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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http : //books . google . com/| i GEOLOGICAL UBRARY r C ( J ^- ^ ^^'^^- JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN I JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN T. R. GLOVER TiA^ Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Public Orator in the University. Author of ''The Jesus of History" ASSOCIATION PRESS New York: 347 Madison Avenue 1921 M COFYEIGBT, 1921, BY T. R. Glovu PftlXTBD IN m UNITED tTATIS OP AMBUCA INTRODUCTION One of the parables of Jesus turns on the ferment of leaven in a mass of meal — & vivid forecast of his own effect on the minds of men. He found a world full of established ideas, heirlooms of a great and progressive pasty and the immediate effect of his coming was a struggle between inheritance and experience. "It was said to them of old time; but I say unto you." The minds of most of us are like palimpsests written over and over again; here the latest notion stands out in the new- est script, but between the letters are to be found traces of ideas much older, obliterated but legible; there the old is almost untouched, but the closer observer finds hints of a "later hand." Every great thinker sets men re- writing these palimpsests, and it is long before it is com- pletely achieved; and often by that time a new story is being superimposed on the corrected page. Jesus had the same material to work upon as every great teacher, and his work was done in the same way, on the same terms, and with the same result in the clash of old and new. He has reacted on mankind, as we all know; he has transformed their ideas, blotted out old preconceptions and convictions, and through experience brought men to a new set of principles; wris) say? Is the ultimate reality, what- ever it be, moral? Or is the whole idea of morality hallu- cination, or a humbug maintained by people for ulterior ends? More than once Plato put his reply in the form of myth, premising that, without pressing details, a man of sense would say that this, or something like it, must be near the truth of things. In the Gorgias he describes a tribunal in the world beyond, where the judge judges every man as he comes before him, naked soul to naked soul; the marks of earthly rank are gone, and the judge, not knowing who this is, looks with piercing eyes upon the naked soul, and sees this and this and this, and judges exactly by what he sees. Absolute justice, that is Plato's prof oundest thought upon the world. Justice is for him the foundation of all existence and its inevitable end. The Jews had the same idea; but in their pictures the judge was not a shadowy figure like that of Plato's; he « Jowett's summary of Rep., 11:360-362; a little abridged. M ^CSu3 IS THE EXnSEEKK or Sm^ jwlgSHMt due 4>x«r. Tiui: fttfart iif AW>iiate ittitk](---tiot kov is oBe to rcKk H ^ Wt Wh^ AOi fbe suadaid be? IW ml iBtenst in lirM^Vfy if to trsKe toe rise eC Bonl seasi; tke p w^eaa owers of mind and character, make, we feel, the true man. What Jesus does is to give them a chance to grow. He has opened the windows of the human heart, or rather has tempted the human heart to open its own windows, to the sunshine of God. It would seem as if St. Paul had anticipated us here, when he says that "God has shined in our hearts, in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Cor. 4:6). Those of us who think about germs (and most people do today), who are interested in hospitals, know that the air of God and the sunshine of God are two of the most healing and protecting things the body can have. Jesus told men, and, what is more, he made men believe, that what we want is more of God, and not less. The sun- shine of God was let into the human heart by Jesus, and the real, beautiful human plant began to thrive in that sunshine, and sin to die. He brought men to the point where they would be reconciled to God. He did this by his death on the Cross — ^that death in which he showed the real nature of God, and brought men to believe that God does not leave them and their pain and sin alone, but identifies himself with man's life. Jesus came into the world to make people willing to believe that God was ever so much better than they thought, to offer reconcilia- tion, freedom of mind and heart's-ease. It is always a person who opens the door to the higher life for us — ^wife, child, father, mother, friend. The great book that inspires us was written by a man or woman of a great personality. All the best things and the greatest, the great idea, the new vision, peace of SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 51 mind» come to us, each of them, through a person; and salvation in the highest sense came through Jesus. "Jesus," as Herrmann says," "did not write the story of the Prodigal Son on a sheet of paper for men who knew nothing of himself.'' Men looked into their language and found that he was the only person to whom the name Saviour really belonged; and since his day it has not been given to kings; it has not been given to other gods; it has become more and more his own, until today the word means no one else. ^ Communion with God, p. 132. CHAPTER IV THE LAMB OF GOD The death of Jesus has been the subject of more thought, one may say without exaggeration, than any- thing that has occupied the mind of man. No treatment of it ever satisfies listener or reader as complete or ade- quate; the best gives one the sense of having touched, as it were, the mere hem of the garment. Whenever we look at him, and think again of his death with any firmness and reality, most of our previous thought seems to be of little consequence, and we are left with the feeling of a great unexplored world before us, of more beyond. In this it resembles the great things of Nature, which are never exhausted, which always have mystery and wonder and happiness in reserve. A man who supposes that he can speak with any adequacy of the death of Jesus is simply not thinking about it at all. But the very difficulty of the subject and the failure of attempts to deal With it are compulsive reasons for studying it. It is too central, too vital, to go unstudied. Better to fail than not to attempt it, for failure will at least reveal something of the great- ness of the subject. There are many theories as to the death of Jesus; and a certain number of them, all ancient and all derived from metaphor, we may group under three heads. There are those that turn on sacrifice; and here (on one side of 52 THE LAMB OF GOD 68 it) we may include the theory of substitution. There are those that rest on conceptions derived from Roman law — ^and deal with courts, fines, penalties and satisfac- tion, with 'persons" too. There are those, the simplest, the most readily understood, and in antiquity the most immediately moving, which are connected with metaphors of slavery; redemption, ransom, price, and freedom are the keywords here. None really covers the whole story. A metaphor like a parable may be expected to light up one aspect of a subject. To press either beyond the proper point which it should illuminate, to force meaning from all its details (or, more often, into them) destroys its value. People who have no feeling for language take things literally; the legal mind does it; and both classes have had a large share in interpreting Christian doctrine. Where the metaphor is drawn from conceptions that are fairly stable, the difficulties are less; but there are few sources of confusion more fatal than the use of language, which seems to convey a clear idea but is really indefinite. A wholly unfamiliar expression or illustration challenges thought; but a familiar phrase, that is not generally thought out, passes without challenge. The simple trick of asking a man to write down the figures on the dial of his watch, may illustrate the point; he thinks he knows them, but the chances are he makes at least one clear mistake; the mind usurps the function of the eye and is wrong. If we are to treat religion as seriously as we do science or literature or politics, we must be sure of our terms. Careless language always means loose thinking, and it suggests unreality which serious people are quick to feel. Little wonder that men have leaned to the sus- picion that the Christian religion is unreal, when Chris- tian terminology is so often slipshod. It is not our present affair to pursue inquiry into all the fields of metaphor where Christians have strayed. 54 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN But sacrifice has been a central thought, and it differs, from most of the other metaphors, notaibly from those mentioned above, in having had no secular history. It has always been a religious term, uniquely associated with ancient religion through the whole course of its develop- ment; for to many minds in all periods the sacrifice has been the very center of all religion. This of itself will explain why the word is so difficult and ambiguous. Re- ligion has changed constantly, and the feelings waked from age to age by sacrifice have been those which men are most reluctant to analyze. It is worth noting, how- ever, that the men who did analyze them became the pioneers in religion. "The Lamb of God" is a very interesting phrase, and it has gathered a great mass of associations. It does not belong to the earliest stratum of the New Testament, though Paul's "Christ our passover" (I Cor. 5:7) points towards it. It is put by the Fourth Gospel in the mouth of John the Baptist in a sentence that attributes to Jesus the taking away of the sin of the world. In the Apoca- lypse the visions of the exile are haunted with the Lamb victorious, the Lamb unlocking the sealed book of God's purposes, the Lamb surrounded by ten thousand times ten thousand clad in white, who "Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb, Their triumph to his death." To understand the writer, we must ask how he comes to interpret life so, and why he links the victory of Christ with the figure of the sacrificial lamb. For, of course, it comes from Hebrew ritual, with a memory of the Passover. Hebrew ritual suggests the symbol; but why did anyone look for a symibol? What was the ex- perience that sought expression? The Passover lamb was a symbol of a number of things — of a great escape THE LAMB OF GOD 65 from bondage to begin ; and its reappearance in the Apo- calypse suggests that the Christian had in his mind the sense of a great deliverance. It suggests acceptance by God, and God's care for his own; and these also were in the thoughts of the great Christian writer. Gradually, by thinking through his language, his turns of phrase, and his symbols, we come face to face with a man who associates a great deal of real experience with Jesus Christ. But it will not quite do to say that sacrifice is the natural word to use to unlock the mystery of Jesus. For today, after nineteen centuries of experience of Jesus, almost every idea that men then associated with sacrifice is lost or transformed — a curious commentary on the notion that the use of the word was obvious. If we are to understand what the writers of the Bible say about sacrifice, we have for the time to strip our minds of all that Jesus has done in reshaping our speech. When I think now of sacrifice, I see a Hindu temple in the bright sunlight of a December day, a temple gaudy with blues and yellows and whites, tawdry and dirty, and thronged with pilgrims. Here was a sacred tree with votive rags tied on every bough; on the other side was a group of priests, naked from the waist up (one of them telling us he is a B.A. of the University), and near them was a little goat, a sacrifice, to be given to the god- dess. One of the priests caught it up, held its front legs back against its sides, put its head in a great wedge; and with one slash of a big knife the head was off and the blood spurted out. When I read in Hebrews that "it is not possible for the blood of bulls and of goats to take away sin," I think of Kalighat, and I understand. People today associate primarily self-sacrifice with "sacrifice"; not so the ancients. One day in the market of Maymyo, in Upper Burma, an 56 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN American friend and I stood by an old man who was sell- ing tapers of some fragrant kind. The missionary, knowing well what they were, asked him: "And what are those for?" He said they were to be given to the god. ''But what does the god do with them?" And the old man said: "I don't know; we give them to the idol." "I don't know!" The ancient world, when it crossquestioned it- self, did not know where exactly in religion was the place of sacrifice. Even of the Hebrews Professor A. B. David- son wrote that "the sacrificial system is left in the Old Testament without explanation as regards redemptive relations, except in a general way/'^ And to think in a general way is a most fertile source of error, as the Greeks have taught us, from Socrates onward. II The longer the history of an idea, the less chance there is that at any moment it will be used clearly. Old memories and emotions, old associations linger and con- fuse the impression; and where truth of utmost moment is concerned, an indefinite impression does not much help thought. A survey of the development of the conception of sacrifice will put us in a better position to deal with its use in Christian thinking. Six stages may be noted for clearness' sake, if it be understood that, while logi- cally they are distinct, chronologically they overlapped in the most perplexing way. The first stage, which anthropologists can recapture for us, is one so old that it appears to antedate private prop- ertjr* — a fact of the utmost moment in interpreting the ideas then associated with sacrifice, for it practically eliminates the individual from the act. The sacrifice is >A. B. Davidson, Theology of tkt Old Testament, p. 307. 'W. Robertson Smith, Early Religion of the Semites, p. 395. THE LAMB OF GOD 57 tribal, and it is a tribal meal, shared by god and men, eating together' for the "reinforcement of both divine and human life."' The victim is an animal, but not substi- tuted, as ancient thinkers later on supposed, for a human being; for early man believed in the "full kinship of ani- mals with men.'" A living bond was established between god and worshippers in this common meal, whose funda- mental idea was sacramental communion.* The operation was as physical in the case of the god as of the man. The god drank the blood of the victim; that is to say, it was poured over the stone, which was the god, or (later on) represented him or was his dwelling (beth-el, /WtvAos.) "The blood is the life," we read in Deuteronomy (12 :23) ; and the scene in the Odyssey, where the ghosts crowd round Odysseus, explains how it is. Such ghosts as he allows to drink the blood of the sacrificed sheep regain a fugitive life; "My mother came and drank the dark blood; and forthwith she knew me and with wailing spake winged words/" Before she drank she could neither recognize her son, nor speak to him. The blood in sac- rifice repaired the waning force and efficiency of the god; and when restored he was more likely to give victory, or crops, or whatever men had felt him to be failing to manage before. The conception, however strange and crude in our eyes, was not unnatural for people who did not yet distinguish clearly between matter and spirit. At this stage sacrifice is closely akin to magic; and the borderline between primitive religion and magic is hard to trace. In the second stage, men begin to lay more stress on the mind of their god than on his physical necessities, and they conceive that the business of sacrifice is to reconcile their god to them rather than to repair his * lb. 252. * lb. 257. »/&. 124, 365. • lb. 439. ^ Odyssey, xi:152. 58 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN energies.* Sacrifice is a gift to placate an offended ^od. The ground of his irritation may be unknown or, if guessed, may be quite trivial. He has, however, to be coaxed out of his ill-temper. This type of sacrifice, the piacular, does not primarily include the idea of sin,* but it recognizes some mental activity and feeling in the god. It is said to have had but a small part in the development of the higher sense of sin that we find in the Old Testa- ment." The "presents," which Genesis says Cain and Abel offered, have a parallel in the Greek poet: "Gifts persuade the gods, gifts persuade awful kings."" Primi- tive law and primitive morality deal almost entirely with acts, not with motives. It was late in history, and a great forward step taken, when Draco in Athens dis- tinguished between intentional and accidental homicide. But this second stage represents a distinct advance in thinking. The third stage gives us the piacular sacrifice, more properly so called — the sin^ffering, a gift made in acknowledgment of wrong done by the offerer or by those whom he represents. What the idea of the wrong is, depends naturally on the current conceptions of morals; but the introduction of moral ideas into sacrifice marks a great epoch in human thought. The second and third stages overlap in history, and they both represent a more developed and thought-out belief than the first, in the possibility of god and man being more or less mutually intelligible. Probably, if heads are counted, these stages are more important than any of the others; views of these types meet us all over the world both in antiquity and today. But the real progress of religion depends on « Robertson Smitb, Early Reliffion of the Semites, p. 396. •lb. p. 401. "7fr. p. 415. "The line is quoted with disapproyal by Plato, Rep,, III, p. 390 E, but he does not say who is the poet. It is referred to by £uripide8, Medea, 964. THE LAMB OF GOD 59 their being transcended. While it is well said that ''the cultus is the heathen element in Israelite religion/'" we must note the desire to be right with God. From now onward even more clearly than before, all progress de^. pended on the growth of the conception of God. The fourth stage, represented among the Hebrews by the Prophets, by Plato among the Greeks, shows a start- ling development. "Nothing," wrote Professor Bruce, "is more remarkable in the prophetic character than an exquisite sensitiveness to everything savoring of insin- cerity."" How profound and searching the prophetic mind was, is not quickly realized, till we grasp how persistent both in Judaism and outside it were the older views of sacrifice. In the latter part of the reign of Jeroboam II (about 760-746 B. C), Amos went to Bethel, and spoke the mind of Jehovah on what he saw there; Jehovah cried : "I hate, I despise your feasts ; I will not smell in your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). It is the more strange, because Amos says no word in condemnation of the idolatry of Bethel. That was left for Hosea, whose rendering of Jehovah's feeling about sacrifice was twice quoted by Jesus: "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea 6:6). Isaiah, speaking for Jehovah, says, "I delight not in the blood of bulls" (1:11-13). Jeremiah more sweepingly says that Jehovah had not spoken about sacrifice at all when he made his famous covenant with Israel (Jer. 7: 21-22), and he is explicit on the failure of the religion of Moses ; a new covenant will have to replace the old, a religion within the heart (81:31). The second Isaiah (40:16) and some of the Psalmists are as em- phatic (Psalms 40:6; 50:8-14). Whether the Prophets would have approved of sacrifice if accompanied by morality and inward religion, is not the issue; those who "Wcllhausen, Prolegomena, 422. ^A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 278. 60 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN « wish to reconcile their utterances with a pre-critical view of the Pentateuch, may urge that they would have; but it is at least clear that for the Prophets sacrifice was not in the forefront of religion, while for their contem- poraries it was. When a man has once grasped that re- ligion is not ritual but mind, when he is a pioneer in this belief, it is generally safer to assume that he takes a bolder view than the temporizing people who endeavor to reconcile old and new and to minimize contrasts. It is of interest to note how swiftly the Christian apologists seized on these passages in the Prophets, how thoroughly alert they were to their real meaning, and how trench- antly they used them to prove to the Jew that the age of sacrifices was over, and that there was no compromise possible any longer on the issue, and, sometimes, that the whole association of sacrifice with the religion of Jeho- vah had been nothing but a stupid blunder on the part of Israel." Plato was as clear as the Prophets that sacrifice was a mistake in religion, that it rested on a wrong view of the gods altogether, and that it confused the moral sense. "Envy," he said, "stands outside the divine choir."" In the Laws'* he signalizes three great errors among men's ideas as to the gods: first, the belief that there are no gods; second, the concession that there are gods, who have, however, no interest in human affairs; third, the worst error of all, that there are gods, interested, too, in man and his doings, but gods who are easily influ- enced by sacrifice. "Quacks and prophets," he says elsewhere," "go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have power from the gods, by means of sacri- fices and chants, to cure any wrong deed of their own or ** Cf. Justin's Trypho; Tertullian, Adv. Jud.; Barnabas. "Plato, Phaedrus, 247 A. "Plato, Laws, x:885. " Plato, Republic, II, 364 A. ff. THE LAMB OF GOD 61 their ancestors in a course of pleasures and feasts" ; for a human feast with abundant wine accompanied sacrifice both in Greece and in Palestine. The Greek world re- ceded from the clear thinking of Plato ; the fear of death, the spell of the past, the charm of ritual religion, were too strong; but Stoics and Epicureans were alike insistent that sacrifices served no purpose at all in religion." The fifth stage is obvious. In Israel, the priests ad- justed their theory of sacrifice to the teaching of the Prophets, toning down the words of the bolder thinkers, as the friends of the obsolete always will. Sacrifice be- came symibolic; it was given a moral connotation which it had not originally had ; it was by all means to be main- tained, while the prophetic warning to cleanse the heart was of course important too. The old books were welded with the new Priestly Code, and the Pentateuch resulted. In this period, as under the Macedonian dynasty, the Jews never let history stand between themselves and their ancestors ;" their religion was semper eadem. The correct theory was that sacrifice was ordained, and suggested to men, directly by God.*" In the reestablished temple at Jerusalem sacrifice was regularly made till Titus de- stroyed city and temple in A.D. 70; and it is of interest to note who maintained it. The priestly family of Zadok gave their name to the Sadducees ; conservative in ritual, they were conservative in thought, and repudiated mod- em doctrines of spirit and angel and the soul's eternal life." At the same time, they compromised in practice and policy with Hellenism and honestly earned by their teach- ing and their lives the contempt of good Jews. "They could only persuade the rich," says Josephus. "Cf. Seneca, Ep., 95. 47-50. »P. Wendland, Hell. Rom, KuUur, pp. 198, 199; Drummond, Philo, I, p. 242. »«A. B. Davidson, TA^o/. O. T., p. 311. "^ Acts 5:17; Josephus, Antt., xviii:l, 4; xiii:10, 6. W. Fairweather, Back- ground of Gospels, 149-153. 62 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OP MEN The sixth stage is represented by the reUffion of the synagogue." The priesthood of Jerusalem had secur^ that sacrifice should only be made in their temple; their monopoly was secure ; but here, as often, the by-products of success were more important. Jews, scattered over the world, from Babylon to Italy, unable to maintain the practice of three pilgrimages a year to Jerusalem (Deut. 12:5-11), had to fall back on their own devices for the maintenance of their religion and the education of their children. The synagogue became their center — a meet- ing-house, where a simple form of service grew up, which needed no priests. A layman could read aloud the law and the prophets; the psalms were sung; and exhortation was given by those who seemed able to do it. No wonder the Sabbath was more observed by the Dispersion than at Jerusalem." How very great an innovation the syna- gogue's religion was, is not easily realized without some intimate knowledge of ancient conceptions. Viuyuam sedem et inania arcana is the epigram of Tacitus on the Temple itself — a shrine with nothing in it and mysteries that were not there. The Judaism of the synagogue baffled the ancient world — religion with no image of a god, with no altar, no priest, and no sacrifice, was un- thinkable; but in the synagogue it existed, and from the synagogue came the three living religions of today. Titus, with the practical man's failure to grasp what is alive, destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple deliberately in order to extinguish Judaism. But Judaism survived the destruction of the Temple, on which since sacrifice ceased to be a real part of its religion, it no longer depended.** *' On the synagrogUM, see J. P. Peters, Religion of Hebrews, pp. 381- 404; W. Fairweather, Background of the Gospels, pp. 25 ff.; I. Abrahams, Pharisaism and the Gospels, pp. 1 ff.; Joscphus, C. Apion, II, 18; Luke 4:16, 20; Acts 13:15. " Fairweather, Background, p. 10. 2« It may be added that the Essene sect disapproved of animal sacrifice; Philo, 2:457; Josephus, Antt., 18:1, 5. \ THE LAMB OF GOD 63 To sum up, sacrifice was a language used by all men, but understood by none; no uniform interpretation could be given to it. Its meaning varied with men's thought of God. It depended on use and wont; it was maintained most strongly by those who thought least deeply on religion. The real thinkers saw that it did not touch the problem of sin at all; it had no effect on God or gods; it could not purify the conscience of man (Heb. 9:9). Sac- rifice depended on the instinct that man must give God something — a natural outcome of anthropomorphism, the danger of which Plato saw. The only real value in sacri- fice, whether act or metaphor, lay in the belief that some- how God and man could communicate, could be intelli- gible; but the clearer thinkers knew of better ways by which God and man touched each other. Sacrifice was in fact obsolete where real religion was concerned; and the stronger minds counted it immoral. Ill In dealing with the Christian religion, its ideas, and the expression given to them, the first thing is to learn the mind of Jesus himself. He was a child of the syna- gogue ; from boyhood he had the custom of going to the synagogue (Luke 4:16), and he was more at home there than in the Temple with its grandeurs and its squalors (Matt. 21:12, 13; Mark 11:15). It would be significant if he, with his genius in religion, his insight and intui- tion in all that bears on God, went back from the stage of the synagogue to that of the Temple, if he fell short of the Prophets. But he does not. He, too, omits sacrifice. His teaching centers in another conception of God. "Your heavenly Father" has not to be persuaded by your gifts. No, it is the other way round; "It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." All ancient ritual. 64 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN all priestly theory of sacrifice and offering, is more than ever obsolete when we hear the voice of Jesus. "Your heavenly Father" has not to be sought: he is seeking you. The good shepherd goes after the lost sheep : he does not wait for the lost sheep to find him. The wonder and the mystery of God is this, that he wants man infinitely more than man wants him, that he makes the offering to man, not man to him, that it is man, and not he, who must be reconciled." The whole of the New Testament rings with that key-note of Jesus. Its writers make no suggestion that we have to reconcile God to ourselves. "Be ye recon- ciled to God," says Paul (II Cor. 5:20). "We love him because he first loved us," says John (I John 4:19). "Be- cause he first loves us, afterwards he reconciles us to himself," wrote Calvin.** In the atmosphere of such thoughts there is no place for the blood of bulls and goats, symbol or not sjrmbol; and historically Jesus has abol- ished sacrifice and banished the ideas that underlie it. The metaphor of sacrifice is indeed found in the New Testament. It is used because it is a popular way of speech, because it is an easy S3nnbol; and yet when one tries to define the idea of sacrifice and realizes the essence of Jesus' revelation of God, the more alien the two things become. The metaphor fails ; the symbol will not do. It confuses the issues. The expression with which we started, "the Lamb of God," is peculiarly hard to grasp with any clear sense of its meaning; it suggests ideas but it eludes us. If some of us still love the old phrase- ology of sacrifice, it is because it has been filled with new meaning and has gathered new associations. But the new meaning is too much for the old words; the new wine bursts the old skin. The old conception of sacrifice makes our relation with God, which is so simple and so ** Contrast Apocalypse of Baruch, 84:1(X »• Calvin, Institutes, II, 16:3. n THE LAMB OF GOD 65 beautiful in the teaching of Jesus, indistinct again; it leaves the morality of the affair uncertain and difficult. It was never dominant until the adherents of the mystery religions, the heathen, came into the Church, and brought, by sheer numbers, a conception to bear on the teaching of Jesus 1:hat was not there at the be- ginning. Then the wholesale adoption of the Old Testa- ment, and the passion for matching everything in the Old with something in the New, and above all the legalism brought into the Church by converted Roman lawyers, changed the general outlook.*" Barnabas had held sacrifice to have been a mistake from the first; but now the feel- ing that all religion must be in some degree sacrificial (let us beware, for the moment, of our modem meaning) begins to gain ground. At the same time current philosophical accounts of God, Neoplatonic in the main, were invading the Church, and making God remote and august as he had never been in the thought of Jesus. Old and obsolete ideas revived, and with the decline of the intellectual life of world and Church in the later Roman Empire there was little power of resistance. The acceptance of the doctrine of the literal inspiration of the Old Testament at the Reformation secured the per- sistence of the sacrificial idea as necessary to religion, till in the nineteenth century anthropology and criticism threw open the way for clearer thinking, and the general return to the thoughts of Jesus directed the emphasis elsewhere. IV But the New Testament has other accounts of the work of Jesus. The writer to the Hebrews, quoting the fortieth Psalm, contrasts two clauses, "sacrifice and offer- ^ On all this, more fully in Chapter X. 66 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN ing and burnt offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest not . . ." and "then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will" ; and he insists that the second abrogates the whole scheme of sacrifices. "By which will," he continues, "we are sanctified, by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. 10:5-10). With a clearness and definition which are not always recognized by his readers, he sweeps aside metaphor and symbol, and speaks things. "The law," he says, "had a shadow of good things to come, and not the exact image of them." One guesses that in his mind is some memory of Plato's cave with the men bound there, who see not things, not even models of them, but the shadows of models, and live prisoners in a world of shadows. The old law of sacrifice and ritual offered not even an image of the real; it was at best a shadow of an image. So he moves away from analogy to psychology, from the symbol to the person. We must try to follow him. Jesus died, he says, to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. What did he do? He identified himself with the will of God, and by so doing cast such a fiood of light on it as transfigured it. He prayed in Gethsemane what he taught his disciples to pray: "Thy will be done." That lies at the heart of all Christian prayer; it is the center of the Christian life; and, suggests our writer, it is the center of the life and work of Jesus. He suggests that, in a wonderful way, a way past our grasp, Jesus and the will of God are identified, and that everything which Jesus did is brought about by that identification of himself with the will of God. There is hardly an author of the New Testament who has such a haunting sense of what it cost Jesus — prayer, suffering, tempta- tion, agony, and, as he says, strong crying. We do not easily grasp the reality and the range of his sacrifice of himself. "He learnt by what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8), \ THE LAMB OF GOD 67 we read, and we think of Greek tragedy and its interpre- tations of suffering, and we remember the width of cul- ture of our author. He has got clear away from the world of shadows into the region of fact and experience, into the inner life of Jesus, the very being of God. If we fail here and do not get things clear, it is because we are not deep enough, or true enough, or enough Chris- tian, to see and to speak of things like this; but let us try to see what he means* When he speaks of the will of God, he means substan- tially what we should call the nature of God. The will is the expression of the real, the deepest, nature. It is God at the most definite, the most essential. The writer suggests, then, that Jesus and the will of God interpret each other; that in Jesus, in his life and mind and death, we read the mind and life of God, the will and nature of God; that in Jesus God is made intelligible to us and becomes our own, ours because we see and understand. Roberts Browning says in his Fra Lippo: "We're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." The interpretation calls our attention to the thing, and changes our feeling; it ceases to be foreign to us. Men had known the will of God, as they called it, but they had not loved it. They saw it from without; they con- ceived of God as a hard, alien, external force, and they shuddered and shrank from him. They had no point of approach, and he remained inscrutable; and the very fact of his being unintelligible made him awful. The arbitrariness of God haunted their minds with terror; it was indeed the source of the fear that drove them to sacrifice beasts to God, yes, and their own children; it was a thing of horror and pain. But Jesus takes the 68 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN will of God, and interprets it, and makes it, with all its mystery, a new thing: he brings us to see it in the light of his own experience* He teaches us to find in God's nature something akin to his own nature, something, therefore, that we can accept and trust, and by-and-by may love. If we may again use Plato's parable of the cave, Jesus has brought us out in the open air, where we no longer have to be content with shadows of images, but we see things in the sunshine of God* We have our faces turned the other way altogether; we are in the atmosphere of God; and when your eyes adjust them- selves a little to the new blaze of light, we look more and more into the reality of things. The writer to the Hebrews, in a later chapter, puts it that Jesus has brought us into the very presence of God (10:19, with 9:24). In the ancient religions of sacrifice, men put them- selves right with God by bargain, and gift, by getting safely away from God, by inducing God to go away from them, or alternatively, by sharing with God a meal, at first merely physical and later on magical, which allowed the sensation of a semi-physical union with God. Jesus has done the thing by bringing us nearer than ever before to God, into the very heart and mind of God. It makes all life utterly different. It means rethinking all moral and religious ideas in a full view of God as he is, and working everything out on the lines of the heavenly Father's nature as interpreted by Jesus in his life and, above all, in his death. A new life, a new world, new men and women, the taking away of sin — all was made possible by the work of Jesus, by his intense unity with God, by the evidence of this given to us in his death. Old modes of religious thought ceased to be possible for men who had any real experience of Jesus; the tradi- tional paled before the real; the shadows fled. % THE LAMB OF GOD 69 As the death of Jesus arrows in significance, men are driven again and again to ask who he was, that he should achieve so great a change in the relations of God and man. The question is a great one; it is not to be solved till we know in some inward way something of the mys- tery of the identity of his mind with God's mind, till we realize the outcome of it all in the history of man, and, above all, till we know for ourselves the love of Jesus. Men speak easily of the love of Jesus; but we do not deeply know it. How could we? How far does the un- trained eye see the wonder of anything? How can we, with our coldness of heart, our hardness and triviality, understand the love of Jesus? But it touches us, and it has touched mankind; and it becomes intelligible to man in that death, in which Jesus identified himself with the will of God. The love of Jesus and the will of God lighting each other up — that has been the essence of the GospeL A modem German Jew has said that suffering is a language that everybody understands; the poorest intellect knows some of its meaning, the highest and the clearest has still something to learn of it. That Is the language that Jesus used, and we understand him there without a commentary. Jesus shows us that it is also the language of God, that suffering is not, as the ancients alleged, and as some light-hearted moderns also say, alien to God, but something peculiarly God's own, that the cross instead of being, as the early anti-Christian controversialists urged, the very antithesis of God's na- ture, is in the very heart of God somewhere. So God also becomes intelligible to men in the cross; his will becomes something we can grasp and understand and approve, something that we can obey with Joy, something that changes the values of life. The statement, attributed by the Fourth Gospel to John the Baptist, that ''the Lamb of God taketh away 70 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN the sin of the world" has historically been justified. There is plenty of sin in the world today; but we have only to read history to realize the disappearance of a great deal of sin, public and private* There were forms of sin, which, as men lived themselves into the meaninsr of the death of Jesus, they would have no more. A society, more and more penetrated by the intelligence of Jesus, could not endure to have slavery continue; the atrocious usage of women went; the killing of babies went ; and many other like things have gone, and the rest will go." For today, where the will of God, as interpreted by Jesus, is real, where people have come near to Jesus, they catch his Spirit and see things as he sees them; they grow conscious of the call to a higher level; they become sensitive to the suffering of others; they find themselves involved in a great change of life, a thor- ough rethinking of the principles on which they live— a change swift, impulsive, and instinctive in som^, slow, deliberate, and carefully thought out in others; but real in both. It means sin taken out of men's lives, new principles of living given, and a new motive in life, a new passion; a new power, a new life — God in short. It is all associated with the realization of Jesus. What the old religion, with its clumsy and vague attempts to reach God, could not do, has been done in human experi- ence by Jesus. It is not out of the way, then, that the Apocalsrpse pic- tures the victorious Christ as the Lamb slain, and again and again associates his victory over sin and evil with his death, and to his death ascribes the purity and beauty of all the white-robed souls that he has redeemed. '^This matter will be resumed in Chapter XIII. CHAPTER y THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN Lather once said that the forgiveness of sin is nodus Deo vindice dignus, a knot that it needs a God's help to unravel. Whether we consider forgiveness as a practical or as an intellectual problem, he was right. As with other matters of real import the difficulties only unfold themselves when we try to solve them; at the first blush most things that matter are simpler than we find them on closer acquaintance. If sin and its forgiveness occupy a far less place in contemporary thinking than they once did, it is perhaps as much due to shallowness as to sanity. To neglect one's bodily health is not much wiser than to fidget about it; quiet thinking about health or sin never hurt any man. The poet of Job was a man who lov«d this glorious world — "The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades. Changes, surprises — and God made it all!" ''When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy*' (Job 88:7). Three or four hundred years after him, another poet of his race — a poet who saw cloudily and in sjrmbol at times, and at other times with extraordinary vividness — "saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away . . . and he that sat upon the throne said, Behold I I make all things new" (Rev. 71 72 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 21:1, 5). Nothing but a new creation would serve; the world he had known was impossible; let it pass. The contrast between these two views of the world sums up a great deal of human experience. With all its charm and wonder, there is something wrong with the world, and the deepest and tenderest natures have felt it most. ''Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." A close attention to humanity brings the mind at once to conduct — to conduct as the index of spirit; and men have been driven in spite of themselves to wrestle with the problem of evil. I It would be a long story to trace the growth of the idea of sin. The records of our race show how, in thinking of sin, men have steadily shifted from the external to the internal. In all man's thought upon life and upon society that transition is to be seen. More and more stress has been laid upon motive, upon the reactive effect of action, and upon spirit and its changes. Morality his grown more reflective, and man more self-conscious and more individual. Taboos live long, but they too are judged by reason. It has been a long, slow process; and in the end man acquits the accident and the external of his sin, and brings himself in guilty. We watch the man in Plato's Republic wres- tling with the lust of his eyes to gaze greedily on the bodies of the criminals put to death ; the fight is within him, and in anger at himself he yields to himself.^ In the Gorgias, as we have seen,' Plato goes further and tells us how sin writes itself indelibly upon the soul of ^Republic, IV:439 E, 440 A. « Chapter II, p. 25. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 73 the sinner. Still more sisrnificant were the contributions of Hebrew prophets and psalmists to clear thinking upon sin. If the Greek brought out that the man who sins, sins against Nature and against his own soul, the Hebrew, with his clearer conception of God's i>ersonality, grasped a still more central fact. Isaiah's vision of God is imme- diately followed by his confession of sin (Isaiah 6), and the words of the Psalmist are familiar: "I know my transgressions : And my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned." — (Psalm 51 :3, 4) Commentators with a gust for the obvious like to point out the exaggeration in . this confession. Whether the psalm is David's and refers to Uriah and his wife, or whether it is a more universal story, the utterance of an unknown thinker. Exaggeration — ^but, in the depths of it, truth. In the new and strange world that Alexander the Great made, the supreme teachers of the Greek world were the Stoics, and their main interest lay in ethics. Bishop Lightfoot well called their new-coined word Con- science {avm&qcns) ''the crowning triumph of ethical nomenclature.'" Another great contribution was wpoalpeai^ (purpose or motive). They recognized motive as the key to morality, while in the older religions, especially the Roman, emphasis fell on act. The change is revo- lutionary. In Judaism there is a cleavage; for some Jews sin assumed a growing importance, while on others, as we shall see, it sat lightly enough. It is interesting to reflect on the processes by which the gains of man's knowledge have been gathered. The modern is so apt to associate religion with morality, that it is something of a shock to be told how little priest * Commentary on Philippians, p. 301. 74 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN and cult and temple contributed to ethical profi^ess, either in Greece or in Israel. While it may he true, as Andrew Lang urged, that in no race have religious cere- monies been unaccompanied by moral teaching, still the priest has rarely been much of a thinker, rarely a pioneer in ethics ; his business passed into his soul, and his busi- ness lay with old rules, with established forms, with the practice of older days. Prophet in Israel, philosopher in Greece, were laymen, men of problems and questions — spiritual anarchists or spiritual reconstructionists, as you chose to regard them; men who cared nothing for settled thought and accepted usage, but who drove hard at fact, would have principle, and must base all on the fundamental. But long before the philosophers and the prophets whose names we know, there were others who lifted the thinking and feeling of mankind forward, men who groped their way to truth, vita didicere magis- tra, felt the pressure of life and built their laws out af experience. These men, slow-thinking, but very sure, were the fathers of the philosophers, their brothers and their best disciples. But, valid and beyond price as the contributions of Plato and the Stoics were, and the contributions of Prophet and Psalmist, a great deal was left to achieve. They settled a great many points. Sin is violation of Nature's laws; it is more damaging to the sinner than to his victim;* it is at last rebellion against Grod. So much was gained, and remains gained; Isaiah and Plato have much to say to the most modern of us; they are not superseded. But Jesus transformed the whole situa- tion by revealing the character and personality of God and by bringing into the range of discussion a man's neighbor and society at large, as the immediate interests of God. He did this partly by what he said, a great deal * Plato, Crito, 49. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 76 more by what he was. ^o overlook or to underrate the influence which has been exercised upon moral develop- ment by great personalities has been a too frequent tendency of philosophical Ethics."" Personality itself has again and ag^in been the revelation that has superseded tradition. The Cross was a stimulus to rethink sin ; and it remains so. The teaching of Jesus made previous thinkers seem shallow; they had handled far too easily the relation of man to God; their morality, sound and true to Nature as far as it went, was not thought out deeply enough; their psychology — ^this is a bold thing to say, when one remembers to whom one is referring — was not sufficient, too many factors were lost. But the Cross carried things further; it became in itself the source of "conviction of sin" ; men by it saw further into the love of God and into the meaning of their own sin than ever before. Put into modern terms, clumsy and ugly enough, sin is the exploitation of man, the using of the gifts of God against God, the negation of God, the repudiation in toto of God's love, of the personal, throbbing, fathomless Fatherhood of that God whom Jesus revealed. "Sin," as Neville Talbot has put it, "sin, as the wilful devotion to self of those who are made for Another and for others, is the central and root tragedy of life." If we are to discuss the forgiveness of sin, we have to be clear with ourselves as to what we mean both by sin and by forgiveness. If Bernard Shaw tells us bluntly that there is no forgiveness of sin, while the early creed will have us say daily : "I believe . . . the forgiveness of sins," supposing that the playwright and the early the- ologian mean the same thing, it is plain that they arc contradicting each other. That is possibly Mr. Shaw's intention. The matter is not settled by either of them, ' Hastings Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 21. 76 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN nor would it be if they agrreed or thought they agreed. What does forgiveness imply? How much of sin can be forgiven? Do we distinguish between sin and sins? What should forgiveness effect, then, if we do so dis- tinguish? n We may begin by considering three aspects of sin which can be readily recognized. If sin is primarily a record, can that record be deleted? But it is never merely a record; there is also what St. Augustine called "the violence of habit";* can a habit be "forgiven," or would it be altered if it were forgiven? In the third place, apart from the record of a man's sins, and his habit of sin, a sinful act of his may have contaminated another man's springs of judgment and conduct; granted that his habit of sin may be overcome, that the record of his own acts may be somehow deleted, how can he have peace, and how can belief in justice be secure, if the influence of his act remain operative in the life of an- other? There are at least three problems here, none of them easy. First, then, the record. Men are always haunted by the consciousness that a thing done remains done. How- ever much they repent, however pure and great and valuable their lives have become — ^"Well, he was in prison for forgery, and she did have an illegitimate child ; there is no getting past that; those things cannot be undone." So the commonplace always think, inside the Church and out of it. So, too, say the religious teachers, the hymn- writers — * Augustine, Confessions, viii:5, 12: "Lex enim peccati est violentia consue- tudinis qua trahitur et tenetur etiam invitus animus, eo merito quo in earn illabiiur.** THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 77 **Liber scriptiis profereturJ* So, too, the Bible, "The dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works (Rev. 20:12)/ So, too, says conscience.* Actions, deeds, are done and remain. Memory cannot abolish itself; remorse is there, furious resentment against oneself for the folly that led to sin against one- self, that robbed oneself of the clean page and the pleasure which the clean page means. Remorse is essen- tially self -centered; it has little relation to others. Where God comes into the reckoning, there is an added horror, a sense very native to the human mind that the record has alienated God. If remorse is impersonal and does not regard others, this is very personal; Grod has been turned into an enemy. By now, if time makes an interpretation valid, the Christian Church has said this often enough; but it is not historically the view of Jesus, it is one of Uie ideas he died to abolish. If the unthinking forgive sin easily, the thoughtful do not; they reckon hardly with themselves. Even if '^Uie fun and self -consistent concept of sin** implies, as Dr. Tennant says, knowledge, will, and intention — if without these, it be not sin — still ignorant acts involve consequences; ignorance traps a man into disease physi- cally; and morally — ? Greek tragedy shows, painfully enough that in a great man's estimate of his record and of himself, his ignorant action counts. Human law will not admit the plea of ignorance; Nature's law does not admit it; will God's law allow it? Does a deep-going man forgive himself his own ignorance? What right has he to be ignorant? The child dies, because the mother *Tbe sbnile is in Danid 7:10; and in odKr apocal^vtic books. It oc cuncd indfpfndently to the Greeks^ some of wbcMn nncnled it — ^Zetw 'voald not hare material for books enoocb; Enrqwles, MelmUppt, ir. S06w Naock. •CL Wisdom, 17:11; if tibe text is riffbt. 78 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN did not know; "I ought to have known/' she says> and she is right; the child was given to her that she might know for it. But it is an insufficient view of sin that emphasizes the deed, and it means loss of proportion. The motive is of more import; it is more real and more formative. Second we set the "violence of habit." Motive, atti- tude, taste, make instinct, and instinct gives a turn to habit and that to character. It was remarked in an- tiquity, and Bums among others of modern times has also remarked, that one effect of sin is a change of char- acter. "Each one of us," said the Hebrew, "has been the Adam of his own soul."* "Whatever the mental pic- tures you often make, to that color your mind (&ai/oca) comes ; the mind is dyed by its pictures," writes Marcus Aureliui (V:16). And Bums: "But, oh, it hardens all within And petrifies the feeling." R. L. Stevenson in his Christmas sermon spoke of the danger of defiling the imagination. The New Testament abounds with similar observations; St. Paul has a series of metaphors all drawn from the physical senses — "the heart darkened" (Rom. 1:21) and "darkened in mind" (Siavocoy Eph. 4:18) ; the mind and the conscience stained (Titus 1:15), and the conscience cauterized (I Tim. 4:2). Cumulatively the pictures suggest a mind cut off from reality — all the channels of communication blocked, and all that is transmitted falsified in the process ; the whole is summed up in a striking phrase, v6v^ dSoici/io« (Rom. 1:28), a mind unfit for its proper functions. "This is the condemnation," writes John (3:19), "that men love darkness rather than light." Much has /been said and * Apocalypse of Baruch, 54:19. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 79 written in our days of the subconscious mind and of the subliminal self, and it is remarked how ideas or at least impressions can be stored in that subconscious mind, which are never lost but, after years of utter forgetful- ness, may be somehow flung into the conscious mind, vivid, horrible, and defiling. There are no "dead selves," they are living in death, potent and septic. So far modem analysis supports the insight of Jesus that from within comes what defiles a man (Mark 7:15). There is no horror like that of the mind finding in odd moments of self -discovery what it has made of itself, learning in awful revelations what things memory and imagination can accumulate for its perversion. Bunyan pictures the Pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death hearing fiends whisper blasphemies in his ears and supposing the voice of evil to be his own thought. If Bunyan says ex- plicitly that the voice came from without, the modern psychologist is not so certain. It is experience that be- tween impulse and act there is an interval in which in- hibition may be effective, but that with surrender to evil that interval becomes shorter and shorter. A man may come at last to be the prey of his own past, a creature of reflex actions, for which, however, he is himself re- sponsible, even if by now they are involuntary and repul- sive to himself, the regular victim of a habit which he developed by surrender to it." A man is responsible for what he has made of his own mind and personality; but the vital question is. What can undo what he has done? In the third place, sin was long ago compared to disease by Plato (in the Gorgias). The comparison is illuminat- ing, and it was used in passing by Jesus. But if a man "R. L. Stevenson in Dr. Jekylt and Mr, Hyde draws the picture of Tekyll waking and seeing with horror the hand of Edward Hyde on the bed; "I had gone to bed Hcnrv Jekvll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained?" Readers will, perhaps, associate odd revivals of the forgotten with the moment of waking. 80 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN is to be pitied for a disease from which he suffers^ two questions arise: How did he incur it, and has he trans- mitted it? What are we to make of the effects of our characters in the lives and minds and personalities of others? If a man of great gifts neglects or misuses them as a result of my influence, if he turns them into instruments of corruption, what becomes of that other lost soul and its powers, used for evil, even if mine is recovered for God and man? Forgiveness, if it is to be real and complete, has surely to cover this third aspect of sin. Ill Many methods have been tried to meet the case of sin. Neglect of it as negligible has been suggested as if it were as good a course as any. Sir Oliver Lodge has said, apparently with some satisfaction, ' that the modem man has not time to think about his sins." If sin is a serious thing at all, it is a pity the modem man should be so short of time. Much stress was laid in antiquity, and some since then, on moral endeavor. The Stoic sage bade a man examine himself, confess his sins to his conscience, forgive them, and then do better." Jewish legalism reached a similar result. But every- thing here depends on a man's conception of God and of God's standards; if it is not very high, he may easily satisfy himself; but if it be a high one, if it be continu- ally expanded with new glimpses of God, then new visions of duty break in upon him, and he concludes, sometimes in blank despair: "Not the labors of my hands Can fulfil Thy law's demands. 9> ^* Quoted by Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 130. "Seneca, De Ira, 3:36, 1-4; Epiotetus, D, 3:10. TBE FOSQTEXSSS OF SDC >: his heart is 4/>fci^j»-L -^i* fxi z he i^is z.^ rieprcwk-h ; he knows UK vui be i* j:^^^."" ""Vi*: :< :c >e dore/* asked Epkieias,'^ "if & lu^ "::e L^ie^ed :o scone t" Ir. Judaism Paul shovs kcv despsir OTcn^x^k r::ei: who ^riv^ themselves to the ecdesTor lo buil-d sp their owr. r^rh:- eoosness (FhiL 3:6, 9) acd were serious &bou: i: — 'X"^ wretched man that I azn, who shaD deliver 7.e frvni this death?* (BimL 7:24). P&al also siviLks of God *Viviiv^ ap" men to the reprobate mind ^Rom. 1:2$"^ And evil passions* though this does not necessarily- inipl>* i\nali:>. Celsiis has little hope of quite mendin^r those who **$\n by nature and sin by habit.'*''' But can desp.'ur bo a ri ^rh: conclusion in God's universe? Here again all turn^ on our conception of God. Expiation is another meau^ of dealin^r with sin, which depends on the same conception. It at least contains a recognition of the prinoiplo of justice, and assigns a meaning to punishment. Ttmi^Hh ment has been held to reveal the natui*e of >vhat is pun ished; in this case it is education, and \\*e oxohido the onjust and devilish idea of it as mere vengennco. Uut if one is not careful, the very means taken to do uwa^* with sin may strengthen its hold; expiation nuo* ii:«olf ba immoral or not sufficiently moral, at any rnto a^ rog»nU the chain of influence set in movement by aIu, uuIoam iiod is really recognized in the whole trnnHaotlon for what he is. How can a man make repnratlon to God. If ho has not a proper recognition of God's naiuroT Still n)oro, how can he, if he has? It was suggcHiod, as wo hhw, in Plato's Republic that some people even reckoned on niuk- ^Pcrsius 3:32. **Epictetu8, D,, 1:5. ^"Origen, c, Cilsum, 3:65. 82 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN ing friends of the gods out of the spoils of injustice. Judaism developed another idea, valid and funda- mental if properly conceived, repentance. "There is nothing about repentance in Aristotle, not very much in Plato; more no doubt in the teaching of the Stoics, though the proud self-sufficiency of that school hardly favors a penitential attitude of mind."" The absence of any definite and operative conviction of God's personality probably explains the slight interest of the Greek in re- pentance." Among the Jews we find the doctrine taking different forms. Mr. Claude Montefiore, in his book Pharisaism and St Paul, explains the standpoint of the Rabbinic Jew, using documents of a rather later date than Paul's period, but assuring us that we may safely use them to reconstruct Paul's milieu.^* A few quota- tions will make it plain. Rabbinic Judaism was "a happy, spiritual and even ardent religion" of the "healthy- minded" (p. 48). "The Rabbinic Jew . . . took a prac- tical view of the situation" (p. 40) ; "the law had been given for life . . • [It] is not in one sense too hard for him. There is no commandment which he cannot fulfil more or less" (p. 41). "Yes, God ... is very angry," but "let a man repent but a very little and God will for- give very much" (p. 42). "The average and decent- living Israelite would inherit the world to come, would be 'saved'" (p. 35). "God's love for Israel, his love of the repentant sinner, his inveterate tendency to forgive- ness," together with the merits of the patriarchs,** would "Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 129. ^\ Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in the Greek term for sin {iiiLaprla, "missing" the mark) another suggestion of this idea that sin hardly con- cerns God. *• Confirmation is to be found in some of the Apocalyptic books. Cf. R. H. Charles, Apocalypse of Baruch, p. 81 ff. *• Compare a bcautitul passage in Wisdom 1 1 :23-26. «»Cf. Apocalypse of Baruch, 84:10. "Pray . . . that the Mighty One may be reconciled to you and that He may not reckon the multitude of your sins, but remember the rectitude of your others." Cf. ib. 14:7, 12, "a store of works." THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 88 amply make up for their own individual deficiencies. Their religion was therefore happy and hopeful" (p. 36) . "Salvation was the privilege of every Israelite, who, believing in God and in his law, tried to do his best and was sorry for his failures and lapses" (pp. 77, 78). The God of -the Rabbis was "very personal and childlike. He did not care for system and theories, but he was always there when wanted" (p. 95) ;*' his people, too, had "little philosophy" (p. 79). There was another type of Judaism which has histori- cally had more influence, the Judaism of the Dispersion, of men battling more nakedly with the world, with pagan- ism, and with the higher thought of the Greeks. Mr. Montefiore finds it "inferior" (p. 93), "more anxious and pessimistic, more sombre and perplexed" (p. 114). It had suffered from contact with the Greek spirit, and "began to invent theories and justifications of its reli- gion instead of accepting it as a delightful matter of course" (p. 96) . "Directly you have to justify a thing, it becomes a little external. ... If you accept ... as a matter of course, you love it without asking why" (p. 99). So the Jew of the Dispersion was "more theoretic and systematic, but his outlook on life was less accurate and less sensible" (p. 96). I have given Mr. Montefiore*s own words, because I do not wish to misrepresent, and because he is the expert and I am not. But the impression they leave on my mind is not quite what he intends. The naiveU of the Rabbinic Jew does not seem to me a higher thing than the more difficult and reflective religion of the Dispersion. It is too like the common sense and the simplicity which we find in other fields and there recognize to be the result of mere inattention. Paul's religion was, as Mr. Monte- » See Ocsterley and Box, Religion and Worship of the Synagogue, pp. 391-403» on the Day of Atonement. 84 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF l^EN fiore says, quite different from that which he describes; but surely it was not of a lower type, unless the philos- opher, who aims with Plato at the "contemplation of all time and of all existence/'" is inferior to the man who has not begun to think or who has abruptly dropped the habit. Things are not simple in God's universe. To be unconscious of difficulties is not to be above them. If this is to defy the common sense of the "man in the street," I cannot help it. In any case. Rabbinic Judaism did not, historically, capture the world; it did not hold the reflective Jews of the Dispersion; and the reason is not far to seek — it managed everything too easily, "healed the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly, saying. Peace, peace; when there is no peace.' ftn IV Jesus is reported by the Fourth Gospel to have said that the Holy Spirit would convince the world of sin (16:9). Rabbinic Judaism did no such thing. Super- stitious and magical as they largely were, the mystery- cults of the heathen were nearer the truth about sin. Jesus with the Rabbis emphasized repentance, but he touched nothing that he did not deepen. He gave men a new clue to the force and meaning of sin; he brought them to a new sense of repentance. Repentance, as Luther saw when he began in earnest the study of Greek, means above all things "rethinking." A man must have some idea of what Ks sin means to God, of what it means in the human milieu. In order to do this, he must have some conviction of God. The knowledge of God will be more fully dealt with in the next chapter. It is enough here to recall how Jesus re-created the very idea of God for men, and this made possible a real re- ^Republic, VI:486 a. « Jeremiah 6:14. 8:11. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 85 thinking of life and conduct. The cross gave men a new object-lesson in the nature of sin and the outcome of it, showed it in its hideousness, for the cruel, vulgar, and negative thing it is. Some realization of God, his law, his nature, has always been the prelude of repentance properly so named, though it is also true that penitence in its fullness is a Christian grace, which grows by knowledge of Jesus. But our problem is the work of Jesus in dealing with sin, and we shall do best to follow the lines laid down already. How has Jesus affected the mind of mankind with regard to the record, the habit, and the influence of sin? First, once more, the record. Something is needed, as the writer to the Hebrews says, that "will clean your conscience." It is conscience that makes cowards of us all; if conscience blushes, TertuUian said, prayer blushes too.'* There is no coming to God, if conscience says we shall not be welcome. It is a question of balance, or perspective, as we like to put it. There stands the record ; we conclude that it is intolerable to God, that it alienates God. Jesus distinguishes; he brought out the hatefulness of sin to God, he never minimized it, his Passion empha- sized it; but he put in the center of hi^ teaching his conviction that sin does not alienate God from the child whom he loves. As we have seen already," Jesus always takes the line that the Father wants his son above all things. The prodigal wastes the old man's substance in the strange land; but it is not the substance (nor an I.O.U. for it) that the old man wants; he wants his boy, because he is his boy and needs a father's care and love. Jesus never suggests that he is effecting any change in moral law, any dislocation, legal fiction, or dodge of any kind. His emphasis is not on acts done, on guilt or on »* Tertullian, De exhort, castitatis, 10. "Chapter IV, p. 64. 86 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN penalty incurred; it is not on law, nor on God's majesty and the vindication of majesty and law; he does not deny or in reality obscure these things, but for him the matter of first significance is the love of God. The record remains, but the sting is taken out of it; the forgiven son leaves off thinking of his record,^ he is more impressed by his father's feeling for him, and if he thinks of the record, it becomes itself of new value for it enhances the wonder of his reception. "To anyone who really experiences it," says Herrmann," "forgiveness comes not as a matter of course, but as an astounding revelation of love." (The contrast here with the ideas of the Raibbinic Jew as set forth by his advocate is patent, and it is significant). Christ, as Zwingli saw, sets men free from the sense of condemnation by reveal- ing not only the divine justice and horror of sin, but also the divine mercy and love; he removes the barrier which prevents God and man from falling into each other's arms.* The barrier is of man's building, the honest structure that conscience builds as a prison about him; but conscience too needs educating and pitches the love of God too low. Jesus changes that; he is himself the guarantee for God, the pledge of God's love. The consequence is a great change of mind in the man. He moves over to God's point of view. He no longer wishes to escape the consequences of his actions. If the Father of Jesus makes a law, the man will now wish at all costs to maintain it, he will cooperate to the extent of wishing to bear the penalty that his Father thinks helpful to him and to others. But is this forgiveness? If the penalty is still to be borne? But what is the penalty, when »«Cf. Luther: "If thou wilt confess sin, then have a care that thtou lookest and thinkest far more on thy future life than on thy past life." Herrmann, Communion of Christian with God, p. 255. " Herrmann, ib., p. 251. M See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, pp. 289-290. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 87 once there is reconciliation? Is it a punishment if you vnsh it? Let him do what he will! The crop sown has to be reaped; but Another will help in the reaping; and it is something to work along with such a Friend even in so painful and humiliating a task. And it is man's experience that in this work, as in all work done for God and with God, the great Friend does the larger part. If Jesus is right about God, punishment is not vindictive; it is remedial,* and justice is love. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him."** When one grasps the inward- ness of Christian thought and experience here, the lan- guage used so often in the past about one's own righteous- ness being filthy rags" becomes quickly intelligible; Zin- zendorf, following Paul and John, is right, when we un- derstand what he means : "Jesu, thy blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress; 'Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed. With joy shall I lift up my head." We may very well use other words and other sjrmbols ; but he too has caught the truth. The cross has lit up the real nature of God ; the love that chose it becomes the supreme thing; the record is not ignored, but its paralyzing effect is gone; the conscience is set free to enjoy God and all his dealings. Rothe, as rendered by John Wesley, sums up the experience : "0 love, thou bottomless abyss! My sins are swallowed up in thee; Covered is my unrighteousness, Nor spot of guilt remains in me. While Jesu's blood through earth and skies Mercy, free boundless mercy, cries." ••Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., 6:6, 46: "The punishments of God are saving and educative"; referring to the punishment of the dead, wjob 13:15 (A. v.). " Cf. Isaiah 64:6 (A.V.). 88 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN Secondly, the power of sin. During the long Euro- pean war, and especially towards its end, all the world realized, as Napoleon had said, that morale is evenrthing. Spirit is the source of victory. Jesus, as we have seen, floods the human soul with an intense conviction of the love of God; and the man shouts in sheer joy: "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me'' (Phil. 4: 13). This has been put in a variety of ways, all pointing to the same experience. Dr. Chalmers spoke of "the expulsive power of a new affection," an illustration from human life which goes a long way. "Every one who knows what it is to be forgiven," wrote Dr. Denney, "knows also that forgiveness is the greatest regenerative force in the life of man."" "The spirit of life in Christ," said Paul (and we had better take pains to give the real value to the words he chose), "set me free from the law of sin and death" (Rom. 8:2). Charles Wesley says the same, as forcibly : "He breaks the power of cancelled sin. He sets the prisoner free." St. Augustine gives a further hint. We love more, he says, a possession that we have lost and found again than if we had never lost it.** A new tie of common experi- ence binds the good shepherd to the sheep he has found, and would bind the sheep to the shepherd if sheep were susceptible of such feelings. Men transcend sheep here; memory gives a new motive, and the common experi- ence of which Christ and the soul share the secret has a power of transmuting the mintis to a plus, with a force that overcomes the reflex of habit. As for the subliminal self and its power of storing dead selves with their hor- rible reminders and influences, the Author of the sub- "Dcnnesr, Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 6. "Augustine, Confessions, VIII :3, 7. THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 89 liminal self may be trusted to purify that self also; for tlie idea that God leaves things half done has never found acceptance with real thinkers. Christ will descend into that hell at least, whatever we say about the Apostles* Creed; and when he has made it full of himself* what it throws up into the conscious may be trusted to be sweet and wholesome. Human love has this effects- changing the innermost character and instincts and stor- ing impulses for good. All this, be it noted, is not conjecture ; it is the experi- ence men have had of Jesus, interpreted soberly, if joy- fully, in language as near the fact as they could bring it. If the language has the surge arid swing about it of "joy unspeakable and full of glory," that is always the mark of real experience, new and startling; and it con- firms the Christian story, that men should find it un- speakable. Historically, men have found the power of habit overcome and the nature transformed by Jesus Christ — instinct and impulse as much changed as mind and heart, a rebirth of the whole being. What forgive- ness could be without this, it is hard to see; it must be this, or it is nothing; and Christian experience is solid on the reality of this change. In the third place, the influence of sin upon others — in some ways the hardest aspect of the matter. ^ A man submits himself to Christ, is reborn, remade, or what- ever our phrase be to describe the amazing extent of the change; but the woman he seduced, or the son whom he tainted with low moral standards, what of them? Can he "Let the wretch go festering through Florence/' and be at peace with God? The act is beyond recall; the innocent suffer or are defiled; how can there be ''peace 90 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN with God," would it not be damnable insensibility? There are two lines of reply. It is a consideration to be remembered, that a man is responsible for his influence, but not wholly for another's reception of it. The great quack of the last days of the French monarchy took in all sorts of persons, but, as Carlyle points out, Gagliostro failed with thoroughly honest people. If the woman or the son, whom we have imagined, had been thoroughly sound, the bad influence would have been turned aside. The man is responsible for the effects of his influence, which are serious enough, but not for another man or woman's self-determination. The other person is never merely wax; he, too, or she, has a responsibility. But, put things at the very worst, the problem will be best decided by reference to the Christian experience of Jesus. "It is simply not true," says Dr. D. S. Cairns, "to speak of the irreparable past, and not well to dwell upon it. Go deeper and take God into account. It is part of his omnipotence that he can retrieve it. The story is not finished yet. Those who believe in God believe in a retrieving future." Thus it all comes back once again to that conviction of God which Jesus has brought into human experience. Jesus was after all the friend of men, clear-sighted beyond the best of us; was he going to leave men unhealed just when the healing mattered most to themselves and to others? To think so is to miss the reality of his nature. Finally, we have to remember that the holiness, which Jesus gives to character, is not a negative thing of taboos, "a fugitive and cloistered virtue," in Milton's fine phrase, that "slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." He has given us another conception of holiness, as a positive and redemptive thing that seeks the contact of sinful men, that faces dust and heat, temptation, agony, and the cross i THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 91 itself — Bomethinsr functional and reproductive, no "trea- sure in a napkin" buried and sterile, but seed sown and growing and bearing a hundredfold, the most prolific and living thing imaginable. To venture on a modem simile, it is more like chlorine than blotting-paper. It is thus that Jesus has dealt with sin. He gave it an importance it had never had before; he brought out its meaning; he got it into the light of God's face. But he also brought men to look on God's face. ''We have peace with Gk)d,'' says Paul (Rom. 5:1) ; it is historically true, and the way of it and the results of it deserve attention. The man who is at peace with God is no longer resentful of God's action, whatever form it take. He no longer tries to protect himself against God. As in a human friendship a man drops habits of criticism and self -pro- tection, and absorbs his friend, so the man ''at peace with God" opens his heart, consciously and, perhaps still more, unconsciously to God. It is not till then that God's personality can make itself felt. The result in the growth of mind and character cannot be hid. Of such growth the Christian Church can show abundant evidence, both in individuals and in the society they make. So that we are justified in concluding that there has 'been some real and effective treatment of sin, that men have been set free from it, and have a new life in God — in short, that Jesus has reconciled men to God, that he has solved the problem of forgiveness, and that the solution is "the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:39). CHAPTER VI THE REVELATION OF GOD Tantum Detis cognosdtur quantum diligitur, — Bernard of Clairvaux. In the long history of religion with all its cross-cur- rents and backwaters, the windings of the stream, and the great barren expanses of shale and sand where no water is, it is possible with care to mark a direction and a progress. Certain things emerge from close study which it is impossible to mistake and which gain signifi- cance as we reflect upon them. Man, it has been said, is incurably religious, and the explanation is given by Plato — "the unexamined life is not livable for a human being.'" He is bound by some- thing implanted in him to reflect upon his experience, and, while thought does not add to his experience, it so brings out the meaning of it, as to make it a new thing and to prepare the way for fresh discovery. The past becomes the present and points to the future — is the future, one might almost say, so truly "Old experience doth attain To something of prophetic strain." Four tendencies may be remarked in the development of religion, not all equally strong in every race but all in some degree potent. * Apology, 38 A. 92 THE REVELATION OF GOD 93 First of all, man is driven to unify his experience. We talk of people thinking in compartments, but it is impos- sible to do it for very long; either the thought or the compartments must go, and with mankind at large it is thought that triumphs. Plato's ideal of "the contempla- tion of all time and all existence"' owes to him a magni- ficent phrasing; the ideal was latent in every living mind from the beginning — a vague date, I know, but no other is available. Probably all the great strides in thought have been connected with the unification of experience. A dis- covery or even a suggestion that reduces our categories, that simplifies our thinking, is always hailed as a step for- ward; if it prove valid, it will never be really lost. The greatest truths are those that achieve this for us most effectively, and over the largest range. Secondly, however picturesque in long retrospect the vague cults and fears of animism may seem, animism has never given a secure foothold to thinking man. The Olympian gods of Greece were bound to overcome their predecessors. Mankind tacitly held that there is nothing in the universe greater than personality; the word is of the most modem, the faith very ancient. Men gave their gods personality; or, rather, they found themselves un- able to think of their gods as less than personal. To recognize the gods as possessed of feeling, intellect, and character was a step forward — a necessary step; and where it was not taken there was no progress. Perhaps the chief value of this step forward was that it made another inevitable — ^to the unity of the godhead. The unthinking in Greece held for ever to vague animistic conceptions, to demons; and there was periodic reaction to them. The separate gods long held the field, but the thinkers saw beyond them. Israel and Greece took dif- ferent roads at this point; Greece reached the unity of * Republic, VT:486 A. 94 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN God more decisively than his personality; Israel, by some happy instinct or thanks to prophetic genius, grasped and kept the personality of the one God, and there lay the key to the future. A third tendency is toward the supremacy of moral law. One of the great struggles in the fifth century B.C., the most brilliant age of Greece, was to decide whether morality were custom or nature, vofio^ or ^ixrts. The word used for law suggested custom as the basis of morality, but experience was stronger than etymology. Human life was not a mere succcession of accidents, more or less regulated by tacit conventions; there was (in our modem sense— one cannot now escape the word) law in it, something underlying it, valid, potent, not to be escaped. If reproduction was a natural human instinct, some kind of morality was another; as real and eventu- ally as imperious. Society rested on something deeper than conventions; if men were to be men in any true sense, theft, adultery, and murder, to name only the most obvious things, were intolerable; they ruined any real human life, they must be a denial of something natural, a refusal of the order of the universe. A long while before Plato made all this clear, men brought to bear upon the gods their conviction of the supremacy of righteousness. Zeus, as ^schylus saw, stands for law, inevitable, universal, and intelligible to man. "If gods do deeds of shame, the less gods they," says one of Euripides' characters. These two great poets do but sum up and bring to expression what had long been working in the Greek mind and what was to discredit their pantheon. The Hebrew moved, perhaps more con- spicuously but hardly more certainly, in the same direc- tion. Righteousness becomes the central conception for all true thought upon man's life and upon the being of God. THE REVELATION OF GOD 95 In the fourth place, man came to realize intensively the significance of his own personality. A large part of Greek history may foe summed up as a series of experi- ments, foy which the individual secures recognition of himself. Politically it became more and more obvious how much he meant ; Greek history was made and unmade in a degree beyond anything we know in the West foy men amazingly, even desperately, individual and unmis- takafole. Greek philosophy is the outcome of the indi- vidual man's determination to do his own thinking him- self, and be done with his neighbor and his grandfather. In religion it is the same. The Greek made up his mind that he must foe immortal.' It is this glorious assertion of personality, with the glad acceptance of the duties that go with it, that made the Greek the world's teacher. Strange as it seems, he had to teach the Heforew the doc- trine of personal immortality. These four tendencies are to be traced through the history of all religion. They have their fates, of course; here one is over-emphasized and another lost. But a survey of the whole field confirms us in the conviction not only of their validity but of their vitality. Where one or other of these tendencies is repressed, religion suffers. Men's convictions as to the nature of God control the fates of races and empires ; they are the most potent things mankind has. A doctrine of God that ignores his unity, his personality, or my personality, or the right- eousness that must govern us both, leads to disaster. Any doctrine, further, that suggests contempt or even inatten- tion towards any real feature in God or man, fails to endure, or, if it endures, the human race suffers for it. My personality includes feeling and reason, the instinct for wife and child and state, an imperious demand for 'Plutarch, who sometimes hits off (or borrows) a good phrase, says, "The hope of immortality and the passion to be is of adl our loves oldest and greatest." iNon SuavUcr, 1104 c)* 96 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN an ever larger life, for a richer development of nature and character — that is what the Greek teaches us, and we know by now that he is right ; and any religion which denies me any of these claims will produce a poorer type of mankind, a lie of some sort, and not the true thing. And further, before we pass on, when the modern man — at his simplest, as we may lightly say — is overheard asking: "How can I be right with God?" the question embodies the four great tendencies we have been dis- cussing; it recognizes God and his ego as paramount, acting together in a single sphere, and both recognizing Right as their common ground. History itself is a record of man's endeavor to "get right with God," to find out God's meaning for human life and to adjust society to it.* II But, as Plato says, "the Father and Maker of this whole it is hard to find, and when one has found him to declare him to all is impossible."" That a sense of strangeness and foreignness lies like a fog across the entrance of the divine country, a certain wonder whether a mere man has any business there, an unreality about it all, is the moving confession of a modern thinker.* God is so manifold that it is hard to be sure that one has the whole of him. His ideas man only slowly gathers; some easily, as those about gravitation and by and by those about fire, and later and with less ease those about germs (let us say) and electricity; but his more funda- mental thoughts are more deeply hidden and only to be * The influence of the Stoic "Law of Nature" on the development of Roman law is only one obvious illustration. ' Timaeus, 29 C; cf. Clem. Alex. Protr, 68, and Celsus, Orig, c. Cels. 7: 42, who quote the passage from very different angles and in very different tempers. •Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 6. THE REVELATION OF GOD 97 reached by longer and more painful experience and thought more long and painful still/ And man is im- patient of the lingering processes of thought. The phil- osophers are so slow, and life so short; one must have an effective relation with God, and there are other teachers who do not for ever tell us to wait and see; they act and achieve — at least they say so. A great cleavage comes in men's progress; these go to the right, moving slowly and stumblingly, checking their move- ments and their discoveries, halting and retracing their steps again and again; those go gaily and confidently to the left, happy in their freedom from doubt, happy in their activity and their sensations; and mankind is indebted to both — though to which the more, we may not so readily agree. Must we know God before we can have relations with Godhead? The Graeco-Roman world was divided on this question. The philosophers were uncertain and slow, not clear about God's personality, stronger on his unity, far from precise about our consciousness of relation with * him. "He is not far from any one of you," they said; they even spoke of a holy spirit within you ;• but then it was not clear once more, whether they meant spirit or breath, a divine indwelling in the soul, or a divine crea- tion of the soul from some fragment of itself (divinae partictUam aurae) * There was, they said, a great Some- thing beyond, the soul of the world (anima mundi) per- haps, or Something further away still, "beyond being."" But how is one to have contact with that? In him we live and move and have our being; his laws condition our life: ^ Hence perhaps the famous saying of Heraclitus (e. 600 IX>) HULt "a hidden harmony is better than one obvious." ' So Seneca, Ep. 41, 1 : Saccr intra nos spiritus sedet. * Horace, Satires, 2:2, 79; cf. Epictetus, D., 2:8: ob iTS^raviUL^l Tov(kov. ^•Celsus ap. Origen, c. Cels.y 7:45. 98 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN « Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient Heavens, throug];^ Thee, are fresh and strong/' For Wordsworth's Ode to Duty is own brother to the Hymn of Cleanthes — ^but younger and more poet-souled. But there were those who were not philosophers, who resented for one thing the philosophic air ("How blest are we that are not simple men")> who were more in a hurry for peace of mind, who tired quickly of the abstract and who resented the infinite distance that philosophy put between them and their hopes, between them and God. The story of the recrudescence of cult and ritual, of superstition and magic, in the Roman Empire is a pain- ful chapter in the history of mankind. But behind it all lay instincts that the philosophers had been forgetting. They were content with a soul, which, while they called it "a particle of God," was really no more than a little parcel of elements to be untied one day and scattered among the larger masses of those elements in the uni- verse — in plain terms, it would be lost." They empha- sized the ego and forgot him ; they urged on him infinite grandeur and failed to see that he had any needs or cravings at all, or suggested that if he had, he might better suppress them. The religious temperament was not to be satisfied so, and it became engaged in a vigorous conflict with philosophy — a battle for the reality, the im- mortality of the soul, for the nearness of God to man, for the conviction that intimate relation between God and the soul is the essence and heart of life. It was in vain that philosophy showed how near God comes to men in knowledge and in understanding, how the divine knowledge and the human hold converse. Men were in a hurry; they grew tired of thinking; they must feel. " Seneca, Consolation (end). THE REVELATION OP GOD 99 The common man's hurry is the quack's opportunity. Hence came, as we have seen, the sects that promised speedy peace with heaven, certainty, security and enjoy- ment, rapt moments and the most delicious sensations of onion with gods, and light upon immortality. Intui- tion and initiation were the watchwords. Religion was dissipated in an emotionalism that lost all sense of defini- tion; nothing was clear, all was vague. There were (and are) those whose teaching is that that is ideal religion; but something was lost, when reason abdicated — the stem morality of the Stoic went, the clear vision of Plato, the very sense of truth." From the struggle certain results emerge. A faraway God will not do; any tampering with the reality of the soul is fatal; emotion is no guide to truth; religion without morality, morality without religion, neither will satisfy the stem and loving nature of man. Ill The Jew in the Roman Empire hiul aftur all a rlc'h<*r heritage in religion than tht; (lrt3**k, IMor** ih(< ather looked to the nation and its destiny than dealt with the individual and his hopes and fears as to another life. They did a great work, for they drove Israel out of the notion of a local and tribal god into the awful thought of One God who rules all the ends of the earth, who taketh up the isles as a very little thing. There are gleams of recognition of what such a God means for the individual. The poet, who wrote Job, ^'reflects all the darkness of the popular doctrine and likewise exhibits the actual steps, whereby the human spirit rose gradually to the apprehension that man's soul is capable of a divine life beyond the grave." Even in death he feels it is "still capable of the highest spiritual activities, though without the body," but he seems not * Cf. R. H. Charles, Esckatohgy, p. 52. IMMORTALITY 123 to hint that this higher life may be endless, natural in- ference as it seems to us from the train of his thought/* The TSrd and 139th Psalms and the inserted 26th chapter of Isaiah show a later and higher development. But generally in the Old Testament Sheol is the abode of the dead, with various modifications, as men's thoughts of God and the hereafter grew deeper and clearer. It was at one time a fashion to attribute much of later Jewish thought on our subject to Persian influence, but scholars today seem much less ready to assert this."^ It is rather during the M• IV Esdras 7:32 £f-126. "Jubilees. " I Enoch 91-104; Fairweather, Background of Gospels, pp. 283-291. There were Arab Christians in the third century (Eusebius, Church History, 6:37) who believed the soul died and decayed with the body and then shared its resurrection; a curious illustration of an older idea holding out against the Greek. IMMORTAUTY 125 Thoagiit has moved considerably, and a Messiah and a Davidic kingdom recede; where they are still kept» the harmonizing of the outlooks is impossible. In Philo the Messiah and his kingdom are very far away in the back* ground, if not out of sight.'* Through all the confusion « clue is found» when we grasp that God and the soul and immortality are dis- entangling themselves from accidental associations, and standing more and more in the light as the real things of experience and of fiaith. The Jew has come nearer to the heart of the problem than the Greek. Jesus drew his disciples from circles where the apoca- Isrptic books were read and known, where men thought in the terms of apocalsrptic. He, too, used the language, but as Plato used the Orphics; he said less and he meant more. The apocalyptic writers had wasted themselves on the circumference, and at the best had a mere confused mass of broken arcs. He emphasized the center. The details are nothing and he left them ; but he brought men face to face with God. His disciples had believed in God, in the soul, in immortality, in future Judgment, before he called them — ^believed, as we say, '4n a sort of a way.'' Afterwards they believed with a new conviction and a new energy, though some of them were long in working out of the old ideas, and perhaps unconsciously, when they quoted his teaching, imported more of these old ideas into that teaching than belonged there. It is quite clear that Jesus identified himself with the growing belief in God, the soul, and immortality, and he gave an inunense impetus to it ; he gave it life, in fact* For the early Christian one argument sufliced for im* "Cf. Drummood. Philo, vol. II, 322. 126 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN mortality — Christ is risen. Men had seen him after his rising, had heard him, had spoken with him, had touched him. Stoics and Epicureans in Athens laughed when Paul came to the "rising again of dead men'' (Acts 17:32) -^educated people did not talk so;** they laughed and dismissed the subject, and went away to thresh stgsiin the rotten straw of Zeno and Epicurus, for Athens was a university city." Can we today say with Paul : "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept" (1 Cor. 15:20), or have we to trim our speech to come a little nearer Athens? We have to consider the resurrection of Christ side by side with what we are coming to know of the facts of psychology, and we have to be as sure of our psychology as of the Christian story. We have to consider the tricks the mind plays upon itself and the part of the physical nature in suggesting them and joining in the play. We have to ask whether the disciples were not just at that stage of culture when the mind fails to realize it is playing such tricks ; and whether we must say that Christ did not rise from the dead, but that certain psychopathic temperaments thought he did and suggested it to others. We cannot shirk such ques- tions; and, in the present stage of knowledge, we shall not get, if we are in a hurry, any very encouraging answer. Guesses have been made at what happened — ^guesses conditioned by our very slight knowledge of the soul and its way; and I shall not add to their number. Instead of guessing, we note that the group of men whom we meet in the epistles and the Acts are the same we met in ** Compare the savage outburst of contempt by Celsus (Origen c. Celt. 2:55), the ''distraught women," "humbug, "misled opinion,** "fancy'* and 'lying.*' ** If I borrow a phrase from The Life of Sterling, I have not forgot- ten Seneca and Epictetus, who, however, took their turn at the straw. IMMORTALITY 127 the gospels, but in outlook, temper, spirit, and faith they are changed. That is history, and it must be recognized and then, if possible, understood. Something has hap- pened; we may recognize so much; and if we are uncer- tain what exactly happened, we may note that it turned defeat into victory, it put the hope of immortality on a new footing, and it changed the history of the world.^ But in any case, Paul put the matter once and for all when he said: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.'' We may not yet be able to solve our difficulties as historians, or to construct the story of the risen Christ, but one thing is forever luminously clear — the Christian faith is bound up with immortality; both stand or fall together. Here again, if we may use the sort of canon we tried to apply before, we can say that, if Christian history and experience go for anything at all in a rational universe, then they point to some essential truth in the belief in immortality. Christian history, the experience to b6 read in the life of the Christian generations and still verifi- able in life today, emphasizes the significance of Jesus. All that has past, all that has been done, carries us back to him, heightens his value, and forces us to ever more vigorous effort to apprehend him. Immortality for us depends on the Person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, it may be said, added little to the ideas of the •apocalyptic writers ; but it would not be very wisely said. It is always bad criticism to suppose that to the original mind words mean at all what they do to the quotational type, to the intelligent echoes. So far we have seen God and immortality associated, and if now we find them again associated in the mind of Jesus, it is relevant, and it is fair, to say that we have a new fact. To judge of his »Thi8 is well worked out by Mr. N. S. Talbot in The Mind of thg Disciples, 128 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN right to an opinion on this matter of immortality, we have to make sure that we have exhausted the value and connotation of "God" in his thought and speech, that we are at his point of view and see God as he sees God» feel him, understand him, share his life and work as Jesus does. Such a canon of procedure would be laid down whatever the historical or literary personality we might be studying. The word comes from the thought — ^have we fathomed the thought of Jesus? The thought comes out of the experience — ^how near are we to realizing that? The experience depends on, as it helps to make, the per- sonality. Are we sure there? We have not under our hands the whole evidence in the case for immortality, until we have made better use of the experience, the in- sight and intuition, the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. If it is the developed and not the immature, the whole man and not the half man, whose thought and insight count, whatever the sphere concerned, then surely here above all we must ask what does our utmost man think? and why does he think it? and how does he reach it? It is to be noted that Jesus chiefly speaks of God in relation to individuals, as if it were in and through such relations that God is best to be known. The magnificent pictures of the Old Testament — "Clouds and darkness are round about him'' (Psalm 97:2) ; "The sea is his, and he made it and his hands formed the dry land'' (Psalm 95:4) — such pictures and conceptions Jesus hardly uses. All his talk, so far as we have it, turns on the significance of the individual to God, and in this he gives the indi- vidual a new value, associating him with a God so rich himself in new values. In parable and in direct speech Jesus brings out the incredible interest of God in the individual and his love of him. Perhaps the crowning instance is the conclusion to the parable of the lost sheep, IMMORTALITY 129 where he borrows or recreates a scene from Job. When God in Job shows the new-made universe to his f riends» "The morning stars sang together. And all the sons of God shouted for joyJ In Jesus' story this happened for one sinner who re- pented. Is it credible that the moral being of a solitary human unit is so full of import for God? Could it he, if that human unit were las evanescent as the drift of smoke from a steamer at sea? Is not the bottom knocked out of all Jesus' teaching, is he not very nearly discredited, if Pindar is right after all with his thought : "What is any of us? what not? Children of a day! A dream of a shadow is man"? For here is a case, it looks, of "either . . . or"— one way or the other — ^the love of God for the single lonely human soul, or the whole race a dream of a shadow. A middle path seems hardly possible here. Is there anything of moment for our purpose in the fact that, where Jesus Christ has been re^ for men, they have instinctively believed in immortality, as if it fol- lowed naturally? In the fact that, where love and loss together make the instinct and the intuition for immor- tality, men, wherever he is fairly represented to them, naturally gravitate to Jesus? Anima naturaliter Chris- tiana, in Tertullian's phrase. Is it a vicious circle, or is it the natural fitness of things? We have spoken of Jesus as a teacher with a unique experience of God, but if we submit our minds in all fair- ness to the experience of his personality, live with him, in him, as Christians have, the matter does not rest there. He begins to transcend our categories and classifications, until we have to grapple in earnest with the Christian conception of incarnation, and the Christian belief that he not merely gives us the truth about God, but "brings God into our life here and now, and that he is in some 130 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN way the author of a higher life, the Saviour of souls» the captain of our salvation (Heb. 2:10), in whom God will sum up all things as the goal of all creation. Our treat- ment of immortality will be conditioned by our Christ- ology. If in the past the conception of God has been the decisive thing in the belief in immortality, today it is our conception of Christ that will be the norm of all our thinking, for on that depends all we think of God. Who then was Jesus, and what is he? M> to »rv thmi ft-^^^mi^ Fih:- jpszBicl ABBwirom Omar, little mw^ thsti T*ind>»r ?irW -'*A aaiBir sDQc:; And, -howt^^tir 4M*k oiT my^tt'i'imTs th^ ffihir^. Are t» d»r J«*«* irix^M^. Lift TOP y&0t fci^wrt S lift up s^uv Vfttcf ! CHAPTER VIII ALPHA AND OMEGA Corde natus ex parentis ante mundi exordium A et O cognominattAs, ipse fons et clausvla. Prudentius, Cath., 9:10. There was a controversy once, of which we hear little today, between Supralapsarians and Sublapsarians. It seems remote enough, this discussion as to whether God's plan for man's redemption, his device of sending his Son in the flesh, was conceived by God before the fall of man or after the fall of man. And yet a good deal is bound up with it. Did Adam and Eve and the serpent really disorganize the whole counsel of God for the world for all time? Had he to alter all his plans, and start afresh with a sort of second-best, with a patch, shall we say, on a mistake? Or are we to say with Plato that "God al- ways geometrizes," that his design is thought out, that he knows what he is going to do and he does it? Of course, the modem criticism of all such controversy is a simple one. How can we know what was in the mind of God round the time of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden — ^always assuming there was a Garden of Eden with an Adam and an Eve in it? We have to accept our age and its modernity. Nothing is gained by affectation. The rather fabulous "Age of Faith" is not for us, however much we archaize ; our date is written upon us, and we do better to accept it and be honest with ourselves. We do not know about the Garden in Eden. Emphasis on fact, on what we can be sure of, 132 ALPHA AND OMEGA ISS with the refusal of mere supposition, is the great gain in the modem way of approach in the spheres of science, history, and religion ; and it comes very close, as we shall see, to the mind of Jesus of Nazareth. But very often weakness and strength come from the same source. There have been men whose weakness was theory. Our weakness today is to be matter of fact; it Is a tendency to concentrate on facts, to gather facts, but to hesitate about using them when they are acquired. That is a refusal of one of the duties which God has imposed on the human mind. Facts are to be used. Imagination is a gift of God, given for a purpose. Our construction of theory on the basis of fact may be wrong, we are told ; we have to reckon with that risk. But if we do not try to coordinate our facts, to reconstruct them, then we are not using them, and we are wrong again, perhaps more badly wrong. The great scientific discoveries have been made by men with the instinct for fact and the genius for hypothesis; but men who were prepared relentlessly to sacrifice every theory, however dear, when It failed to cover the facts. We have to frame theories and to test them; for it is by this method that we advance knowl- edge. Mere idle spinning of fancies is quite another thing. Work on the basis of our reconstruction of fact is one of the surest ways to fresh discoveries. Otherwise we might as well know nothing. The early Christian was carried Into a whole new world of fresh experience. There has been nothing like it in human history. ''We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea/^ 134 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN Our English poets have spoken nobly of the joy of that discovery of the Pacific Ocean; a whole new world un- explored and we the first to reach it I The early Chris- tian had a similar happiness; he was face to face with new fact and new experience, far beyond anything that anyone had ever dreamt of. He started from the great fact of the historic Jesus, from his personality, from the largeness and variety of his character. To be with Jesus was revelation. To watch him, to see the movement of his face, to look at his eyes, to catch his tones, brought a man in a new way face to face with the real. Anyone who has been on some mountain with the mists all about him, the shapes of things all lost or transformed, knows what it is when the sun comes and the mists go, and you see the real. world in a new light of beauty. There are friends whose effect on our minds is much the same. The coming of Jesus, his very person, cleared the mists away ; and above all, his death lit up the heart of God. The Pacific beckoned the mariner on to exploration; and the death of Jesus has called men to explore God; and what followed his death, the resurrection and all associated with it, formed another great area of fact that set men wondering, thinking, forming theories, testing them, exploring God. Men had been possessed by the notion of a divided world, where the ways of foreigners, their thoughts and their religion, were things apart and irrelevant. Our religion for us, they said, your religion for you.' It was a wrong theory, and it did not bear out even the facts of the ancient world ; for Alexander the Great had shown the unity of the world, and the Stoic teaching emphasized the common humanity of man. But the news of Jesus Christ spread swiftly over the world; something leapt from heart to heart, it captured men, and all the invinci- *Cf. Celsus, ap. Origen c, CeU., 5:25. ALPHA AND OMEGA 18S blc natural barriers between men turned out to be imair- inary. The great fact was revealed by the spread of the Gospel into all the world, that man is man, universally the same; with the same aptitudes, the same nature; the soul was, as Tertullian said, "naturally Christian," Chris- tian in its inmost essence and nature. The common passion felt for Jesus the Saviour bound men to^rether as neither empire nor philosophy had done. That, too, was a revelation. The call of the Gentile and the response of the Gentile upset men, sta^r^rered them, startled them into a new recognition of God and of all that is associated with Jesus. The new relation with God, of which they had become conscious in Christ, was another stimulus to thought. Justified, as Paul said, by believing in Jesus, put right, readjusted, we have peace with God. With this peace with God went much else — ^victory over temptation, itself a revelation of new fact. The power of temptation de- clined, the interests were changed, when a man found himself in Christ. He had what .today we might call heightened effectiveness, but what he called the power of the Holy Ghost. Paul strikes the note, when he says : "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Furtiher, men had what George Fox later on called "great openings," new visions of the relations of things, glorious divination of the purposes of God, of God's methods, of new forces at work in the world, glimpses of God's de- vices lEmd God's ideas. Men found all these in Christ; but why? Long before Plato had said that the unexamined life is not livable for human beings;' and here was the early Christian with an extraordinary mass of new experience, all associated with Jesus of Nazareth. He could not let it alone; he must move on to an explanation of Jesus; and * Plato. Apol., 38 A. 136 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OP MEN many were offered, first and last. The writer of the Apocalypse, looking: before and after, summed up the story when he called Jesus Alpha and Omega, the be^rin- ning and the end. I do not know of literary antecedents for his use of these two letters of the alphabet; but some- times people are original, and not infrequently experience of Jesus is the secret of their freshness of mind. The writer coined a phrase and the Christian world ac- cepted it. II First of all, let us look at Alpha. Nowadays we steal ideas from scientific books and scientific men, or, to be more exact, the journalists steal them and we borrow from the journalists, and at each stage of the process something is lost. Natural law haunts our minds. Some of us are possessed by a theory of natural law churning on for ever and ever and ever, with no heart and little mind at the back of it, as if evolution evolved itself and needed neither an intelligence nor a power behind it to start it or to maintain its process, whatever that may prove to be. Ancient Greek thinkers, the serious ones, emphasized God's Providence (vpovoui). It was a great word in those days; it covered the government of the universe, and there were those who hoped that it covered the lives of individual men. The keynote of all Jewish apocalyptic was Providence — ^perhaps the soundest ele- ment in all that strange literature.* The Christian, grow- ing up with the idea, and then brought into this new ex- perience of Jesus, was bound to connect the two. God must have thought about Jesus ahead of the time.* What •See Wisdom 6:8: 12:8; 14:3; 17:2. *Here one Jewish view of the Messiah helped. The SimiHtudts of Enoch (I Enoch 48. 2 f) — dated bv Dr. Charles, 96-64 B.C., teaches the Messiah's pre-existence. "Yea, before the sun and the signs were cre- ated, before toe stars of the heaven were made, his name was named before thft Lord of Spirits . • . (6) before the creation of the world." ALPHA AND OMEGA 137 is the alternative? Can we really picture God in the style of a celestial Mr. Micawber, "waiting for some- thing to turn up," till, unexpectedly, through the unfor- seen action, I suppose, of natural laws, Jesus is thrown up on the surface of things, a happy chance, that enables some of God's ideas to be fulfilled, a great piece of luck for God? The thought is impossible; it negates the very idea of God. Christians have always been amenable to the ideas of their times, and this was one bound up with the nature of God. They were confronted by what we still feel to be the most wonderful character of history, by the trans- formation of every aspect of life, and by a great move- ment in every people of the world they knew. Small won- der they connected their experience with their conception of Providence. God must have foreseen it; yes, before ever he laid the foundation of the world, they said, God loved Christ (John 17 : 24) . The followers of Jesus felt they were witnesses of the supreme fulfilment of God's thought-out ideas for the world. God foreknew, God purposed and planned the death of Jesus on the Cross. The New Testament is full of that conviction. It was no accident, no blunder, no patch on a mistake; it was the design of God himself. To that the thought of the early Christian was brought by his experience of Jesus. A misguided ingenuity set the apologists of the second century to work upon the Old Testament, to prove by texts that from the very first God had been telling mankind in riddles what he would do. Nothing could be more in- genious or more perverse than some of these attempts, but they bear witness to the conviction that Christ is no chance item in the world's story. The Assumption of Moses (dated by Dr. Charles between a.d. 7 and 30) makes Moses sav that "the Lord of the world prepared me before the foundation of the world that I should be the mediator of His cove- nant" (1:14). 188 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN Christian thought went still further. In the Epistle to the Ephesians (1:4) we read that God chose us also in Christ before the foundation of the world. The Apoc- alypse speaks of names written from the foundation of the world in the Book of Life (18:8; 17:8)." The word in these passages translated ''world" does not mean the earth ; it means the universe, infinite, order- ly, and thought out by Grod; and Christ, they suggest, is the deepest, the most essential, expression of the very being and mind of Grod; and they conclude, not unreason- ably, that all began with Christ, that Christ is Alpha. That is not our modem way of thinking. It is weU to face up to a conception of this magnitude, for it is a chal- lenge, and to ask, if not this, then what? Have we the issue in our minds, are we facing the alternatives? Is the Church really thinking deeply enough about what is implied and involved in that historical Jesus, who has remade the world and has remade us? That there is in this line of speculation a real danger of slipping into some form of fatalism or determinism, is evident. Luther found the corrective of predestinarian thinking in the very person whose significance has turned us in this direction. He saw the consequences of over- emphasis, and he said bluntly: ''Dispute not in any case of Predestination. But if thou wilt needs dispute touch- ing the same, then, I truly advise thee to begin first at the wounds of Christ, as then all that Disputation will cease and have an end therewith.'" If the impossibility of Christ being an accident leads us to a strong view of Providence, the other impossibility, of his being a cog in the inanimate wheel of things, neither more moral nor *Cf. II Enoch (Secrets) 23:5; "Every soul was created eternally before the foundation of the world." We have here to remember the Platonic doctrine of preexistence. •Luther's Table-Talk, ch. XXXVII, p. 405, in the first English trans- lation (folio) by Henry Bell, a volume with an interesting story of its own . ALPHA AND OMEGA i9» less moral than Jadas, is Qait« as unthinkable Tho stronir vivid humanity of Jesus is our prime faet; and in theology^ as in all spheres of thought* every deduetlon has to be controlled by the facts of which we are certain. Historically* Jesus has stimulated thought and specula- tion, and has been again and again the corrective that kept it sane and true. Ill Let us turn to Omega. If God foreknew Chrlit, Chrlit is the fulfilment of God's ideas for man; the guarantee that man is not a mistake^ a blot on the universe. Paul once said that 'Un Jesus is the Yes" (II Cor. 1:19, 20). Ancient religion was largely negative; the taboo domi^ nated it ; and on the moral side 'Thou shalt not" was the note; as if to be man, a man must be anything rather than man, as if the human was all sinful. But Jesus, as R. L. Stevenson wrote/ ''would not hear of a negative morality." 'Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" ; "Thou shalt not steal"— so ran the old law. "Be of good courage," said Jesus, "freely ye have receivedi freely give ; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." As for the powers of evil which obsessed the minds of his contemporaries, while it appears that Jesus accepted the current belief in their existence and activity, he laid no stress on them; instead he empha^ sized God Religious teachers have often put temptation and its dangers in the forefront of their lessons* In the story of the empty bouse Jesus shows his mind plainly; he has not come to reduce human life to vaeuity and nonentity, but to fill it with God, with the great, splendid, various God whom he knows; and to prov(^ that, §q filled; ^ Cknttrnv Serm^n^ CfmUmH Effbcrvoo Cf . 2 Clement 13:3, on the contrast between Christian preaching and Christian conduct as a source of Gentile rejection of the Gospel as 1066^ rivaxal vXivirr. " The emphasis on the prophets points to an early date for this book; cf. Chapter XIII, p. 233. 158 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN The Church took refuge at last from the prophet in the president or overseer, the '*bishop" as etymology would call him. Without disputing over the status and so forth of the bishop, we can admit a certain leading of the Spirit here. As the native churches of China and India and other lands largely pagan gain independence, we shall see strange outcrops of what we, taught by church his- tory, shall recognize as heathenism ; and a sound practical bit of advice for the moment will be "stick to the mis- sionary," and it will be a parallel (saner, let us hope) to the emphasis of Ignatius of Antioch on the bishop. The early Church, perhaps, had suffered too much from prophets; but organization was too rigid a Roman trait, and the reaction to bishop against prophet was carried too far. "Prophesying," wrote Edwin Hatch," "died when the Catholic Church was formed." It cost the Church endless schisms through the centuries, not all of them beneficial. The contest between the Spirit under control and the Spirit in free play, as it has been called, still g. jt^i^^-i 212 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN this chsLnge, would go another; for the city of Athens he would put something larger. " 'Dear City of Cecrops !' said he of old/' so Marcus Aurelius wrote in his diary (4:23), "and wilt not thou say, 'Dear City of God'?" Jesus would have said it, indeed he did say it in his own vocabulary; and when he speaks of the Kingdom of God, it is with the fullest emphasis on the Founder and Maker of his ideal city or kingdom. "City," the writer to the Hebrews calls it, a man steeped in Greek ways of thought ; "Kingdom" was the Hebrew word of Jesus. It was the boast of Athenians that Athens was the education of Greece.^ Greece was as truly for a thou- sand years before Christ, and for some hundreds of years after, the education of the world, and in some degree it is so still. The great lesson was what Pericles set forth — that more might be made of man in every way, thinker, citizen, parent, poet, artist; and the Greek showed how it might be done. The barbarian and the Greek differed above all in this, that life with the Greek was better thought out, better understood, and therefori better used. About a.d. 178, Celsus, in his attack on Christian- ity, allowed that barbarians — people who were not Greeks, such as the Egyptians and the Persians, and in a good temper he might possibly have added the Hebrews — were able to discover religious truths (dogmata is his word), but "to judge them, to establish them, to develop for moral growth what the barbarians have discovered — that is a task for which the Greeks are fitter.'" It was very much the idea of Greek Christian thinkers. The Greek did make more of life and more of man than any people of antiquity — ^humanized man, in fact. And if we say that Jesus carried the process further, it is well first to see, in outline at least, what the Greeks had done before him. » Thucydidcs, II, 41, 1. * Ap. Origen, c. Cels., 1:2. THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 213 A thousand years, perhaps, before Christ Homer drew some of the finest pictures of chivalry that the world has yet had. His imagination sees deep into human charac- ter, and the great fundamental human virtues move him. He reads the warrior's mind and shows us the hero. "Friend of my soul!" says Sarpedon, "were it that, once we two were escaped from this war, we should live for ever, ageless and immortal, neither would I fight in the forefront, nor send thee into the battle that gives glory to men. But now fates of death stand over us, ten thou- sand of them, that mortal man may not flee nor escape; therefore let us go ; either to another we shall give renown or he to us."* When Andromache begs Hector to stay, not to go to the battle and leave their baby boy an orphan, "All this," he cries, "is a care to me; but I have a respect unto the Trojans and to the long-robed Trojan women."* That is Greek courage, courage with the eyes open, the risks well seen and taken; and there is another virtue there, aidos, self-respect blended with the thought of others. Aidos carries with it regard for suppliant and stranger, for the helpless, for the fallen foe — "Not holy is it to boast over men slain"; it is the sense that there is a god, and the greatest of all gods, who looks after the stranger within the gates, the herald from the enemy, the helpless. It does not always prevail; the Homeric hero is capable of horrible ruthlessness — "Heaven send not one of the Trojans escape sheer doom and our hands — no, not the lad whom his mother carries in her womb !"' But Achilles lets the aged Priam ransom his son's body ; •Iliad, XII, 322. * Iliad, VI, 441. • Iliad, VI, 57. .jUiH 214 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN the scene is one no reader can forget. Athene enjoys the lies and cunning of Odysseus ; but Achilles cries from his heart: ''Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is he who hideth one thing in his heart, and speaketh another/^ The simple great natural virtues are all in Homer. A later day saw the rise of the intellectual virtues — of the instinct to know, to inquire, to understand, and to judge — of the courage that will face new ideas and new ignorance, that will move away from ancient moorings and explore strange seas of thought— of the feeling that thought is not luxury or amusement, but duty, man's supreme task. Here Ionia and Athens led the way. Later still in the days after Alexander the gentler vir- tues rise. "Mere unmotived kindness,'' as Mr. Bernard Bosanquet points out, becomes a spring of action; there is a new feeling for children and women, for slaves ; a new sense for beauty in flower and tree and murmuring sound.^ Stress is laid by the Stoics on the intrinsic value of goodness, the importance of will, the inwardness of true virtue, the examination of conscience, the control of impulse, the cultivation of God's outlook. Socrates used to say he was a ''citizen of the universe (Koa-fjuo^), " After Alexander patriotism and parochialism ran into one another; patriotism had no other meaning. The world's old divisions were gone; the new kingdoms were personal domains with no stable frontiers. Race was more than country, and race itself was of little account. Alexander had "married Europe to Asia." In one sense the universe was the only body politic left of which a man could be a citizen. A subject of Antiochus or of Ptolemy — or, later on, of Caesar — ^he could still boast and believe in the city of Zeus, the universe. The Stoic was glad to accept this new franchise; he knew no longer of foreigners or local laws, "man was a sacred 'Iliad, IX, 312. ^ Theocritus, Idyll, 1:1. THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 215 thing to man/' and men and stars were ruled by one law, divine, eternal, inevitable, the law of Nature, a law that knew no outlaw, foreigner or barbarian, one for man and woman, slave and free. The conception powerfully modi- fied Roman law in the direction of breadth and humanity. The world's progress had been immense, but it still had a long way to go. If the Stoic counted ''man a sacred thing to man," the government did not. The citizenship of the universe was amenable to Aristotle's criticism of Plato's Republic; relations within it were "rattier watery." Those who talked most of it were men without children, a class notoriously sagacious without under- standing; and when one remembers that one of their ideals was "emotionlessness" ("the savage and hard apathy," Plutarch calls it), it grows clear that a great deal of life lay outside the range of the citizen of the uni- verse. Indeed his teachers told him, as a practical meas- ure, to keep within himself, to be limited to "the things in thine own power," tecum habita — ^to condole but not to sympathize; to reckon, if he had a child, that it would die; to realize that, if he did not love his wife's beauty, he would not be thrown into emotion and out of balance by her adultery. "Emotionlessness" was bound to work out into inhuman insensibility; it was inwardly a selfish counsel, a counsel of despair, to steel the heart to keep it from breaking, to keep it equal to work. It was, as some more human critics felt at the time, in effect an apostasy from the universe, unbelief. They preached nature and defied nature. The motive was not the highest, and no other will avail with mankind in the end. But, as Dr. Edward Caird pointed out,' the Stoics missed the vital fact that man is essentially a develop- ing being, "partly is and wholly hopes to be," There was not enough experiment about the Stoic; who can ■ Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, II, 102. 216 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN master human psychology, who turns his back on woman and is not interested in children? They made great con- tributions to psychology, but in i;vhole areas of the soul they had no belief. Nor did they believe so much in per- sonality as to be able to carry it past the dissolution into atoms. For men who reject immortality, who do not believe in outcome to their own endeavors to help man- kind forward even on earth, Stoicism is the highest phil- osophy, and a very hig^ one; but it cuts too many ques- tions to do more than contribute to rival creeds. Where Stoicism failed, the mystery cults were not likely to succeed. It is the complaint of many that in the European war civilization failed, and many others hold that it had already failed in peace. But in the early centuries of our era, under the best government that the Mediterranean broadly had ever known, and in peace, civilization rested normally on atrocities that today are abnormal even in war. That it grew gentler under the Empire, is a propo- sition hard to maintain in view of the civil wars and reli- gious persecutions of the third century a.d. It had reached a standstill. In four hundred years the tools show no improvement; currency and finance decline; government grows more and more bureaucratic, and apart from the Christian Church it is difficult to find new ideas anywhere. II "The advance of the community depends not merely on the improvement and elevation of its moral maxims, but also on the quickening of moral sensibility. The latter work has mostly been effected, when it has been effected on a large scale, by teachers of a certain singular personal quality.'' So wrote John Morley in 1874,* and it will serve as a text for the next stage of our study. • Compromise, p. 237. THE HUMANIZING OF UFE 217 The rejection of Jesus gives the measure of his age. He had, like other leaders of men in the field of intellect and feeling, to develop the spiritual and intellectual qualities by whicti he should be understood. Here once more, as in the case of the knowledge of God, Jesus abolishes nothing real; he comes "not to destroy but to fulfil"; and the boundless significance of his work lay in uniting all the virtues, that the common people and the Stoics between them knew, in a new and intimate relation with religion, or rather with God, and giving them a new breadth and freedom and life. The theory on which men do kindness is one thing, the real reason another ; there are people who do good by instinct and on impulse and give wrong rea- sons for it — a fact to be remembered when we criticize Stoic theory; but Jesus gave all virtue a new center and a new motive; act and theory jarred no more; the human spirit had a charter and an inspiration to be what God meant it to be. The fact that he was a carpenter, a poor man, im- pressed men from the beginning. "He took upon him the form of slave," wrote Paul (Phil 2:7). "The Lord ate from a cheap bowl," said Clement of Alexandria," "and made his disciples lie on the ground, on the grass, and he washed their feet with a towel about him, the lowly- minded God and Lord of the universe. He did not bring a silver footbath from heaven to carry about with him. He asked the Samaritan woman to give him to drink in a vessel of clay as she drew from the well." Jesus, writes Phillips Brooks, "so poor, so radical, so full of the sense of everything just as it is in God."" A fictitious Chinaman of our day speaks of him as "unlettered, untraveled, inexperienced" — a rather aca- demic view of things. Unlettered he was not; he read »»aciii. Alex., Poei., II. 32, " Light of tkt World, p. 87. 218 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OP MEN the Old Testament In Hebrew, and other books; and he spoke Aramaic and Greek. A man with two hakgamges, who at least reads a third, is not quite illiterate. Bot inexperienced — ^what is eiqierience? It depends on a man's gift of seeing and feeling. Jesos himnrff speaks of men seeing but not seeing; more than once he notices this in men, and with an air of surprise at them. Pales- tine was not a backwater; it was on a trade route; and if it had been an out-of-the-way place. Boms may suggest to us what experience a man of genius may gain in a comer of life. Climate and the habits of the day drove Jesus outdoors for his education, and it was reaL He knew what it was to work all day, and, on coming home, to have to face the tragedy of the lost coin, the children hungry, and the clothes past mending. A man who goes through sudden popularity, who carries a threatened life, who lives with a cross before his eyes, may be surmised to have had experience. But it is enough to survey his interests. "Suffer little children to come unto me,'' is a saying hardly to be par- alleled in ancient literature. How can he who has to teach mankind go "looking for something to heat the water in for the baby's bath?" is the question of ^pictetus." Like Dr. Johnson, Jesus loved young men, whether like Dr. Johnson he found them more virtuous than old men, or (as we did in the European war) saner. The evangelists emphasize how he spoke with women and took kindnesses from them. He was not afraid of women, nor ever warned his followers to keep away from them. He never felt family life to be a mistake or hinted that marriage was unclean; and how many religions past and present have stood for celibacy, and resented God's invention of sex? The traditional Moses seemed to imply that labor was God's curse on sin, but no such idea is to be found in the »»Epictetui, Diatr., 3;22. THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 219 teaching of Jesus. How many of his parables show a bright interest in human energy, in the mind set to work, in the tasks of men and women? And not a hint that it is all a curse! 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?'' he asked. Is God's man (in other words) or your taboo of more consequence? 'Is not a man better than a sheep?" (Matt. 12 :12). It is hardly a hundred years since English law was with great difficulty persuaded to admit this prop- osition, and to leave off hanging a man for stealing a sheep. If he had lived today, Jesus might have asked still worse questions. Jesus had none of the resentment against humanity which has at times swept over the finer spirits of our race, a mood to be read in Shakespeare himself. With his eyes open to human hatefulness, Jesus likes men and enjoys them. His quick responsiveness to the emotions of others, to the woman's wit, his pleasure in sharing the feelings of his friends, his sympathy with ''the least of these, my brethren," his sensitiveness to the unsaid — ^all these gifts reveal not only character but faith. A genial interest in others may be born in a man, and it may degenerate in various ways; or it may be interwoven with a deeper insight, and become a great belief in man as a creation of God, embodying (one may say it) the deepest thoughts of God, a great deal of God's own nature. That this is the case with Jesus appears from his acute pleasure in bird and flower, and his relation of these things to the mind of God, and from the assurance he gives to his dis- ciples that **ye are of more value than many sparrows." By a curious chance an inscription has been found, issued by an ancient food control office, fixing the maximum price for sparrows, so much for a string of ten, five for a half of that, and for a quarter of it two."* Jesus quotes the }* Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 271. It belongs to the reign of Diocletian and gives prices of various foods. Sparrows were cheaper than thrushes and starlings. 220 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN prices and then sets another value, very different, upon the birds, by sweeping: at once into the presence of Grod; and then, with the picture of Grod himself, interested and delighted in every individual sparrow, with the sparrow thus raised to the highest point it has ever reached, he reminds men how much more thought Grod has put into them, how much more interesting Grod finds them, how much more lovable. He brings out the significance of man by bringing him into relation with God, and it is exactly the opposite result he draws from that of civil servants and statisticians. To the Inland Revenue OfSce a man has a certain tax- paying value, apart from which he seems negligible. To the census official a man is (let us say) one-forty-miUionth of the United Kingdom. By similar calculation the sta- tistician will bring out that to God a man's significance is 1,500,000,000 of mankind ; and when he has multiplied the denominator by the (possible) millions of generations of eternity and again by the number possibly as large of conceivable other words, he makes the individual an incalculably trivial item in God's universe. Jesus alters all that by bringing in the Fatherhood of God. It would probably be impos- sible for even the stupidest civil servant to comfort a father in the loss of his son by pointing out that he has lost only .25 of his family, or even less, .125. The boy is not a fraction but an integer — "John" is a personality not a decimal. Jesus blots out the humiliating denominator and leaves the numerator, and by insisting that each man as a personality is an integer for God, gives a new value to all human life. THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 221 III It has been complained that Jesus, with the horrors of slavery under his eyes, said not a word about it. Of how little use a discussion of the false economics of slavery would have been in that generation, may be guessed from the scant attention paid by our own to the warnings given us of the disastrous effects of war upon the world's economics. We were told; but we all knew better, and were wrong. In the nineteenth century the merchants of Liverpool gave a gold casket to the Prince Regent for his endeavors to maintain against Wilberforce and Clark- son and other enthusiasts that essential foundation of England's commercial prosperity, the slave trade. The experts were on one side, and on the other the "philan- thropists" and "agitators" ; and "most of what is decently good in our curious world," says Lord Morley, "has been done by these two much-abused sets of folk."" And what set them to disturb England about mere Negroes? His- torically, it was the assertion by Jesus of the value of the individual Negro to God — ^not so much by word spoken, as by the quieter and more impressive witness of the cross. Jesus, unable to convince men in any other way, died for the Negro. Paul, dealing with the religious ideas, valid enough, of some of his friends, brings in a final consideration : "De- stroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died" (Rom. 14:15). The very phrase dhimes through the Christian centuries. When the new Roman governor of Cy**enaica about A.D. 410 began to oppress the people, the brilliant and charming Synesius wrote to him in a tone that he oould not mistake; the governor was treating human beings as if they were cheap, but "man is a thing of price, for Christ died for him." The scholar Muretus " Recollections, II, p. 172. 222 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN in 1554 said the same to the physicians who proposed to try upon him an experiment, in anima vUi: "VUeni ani- mam appellas," came a voice from the bed, "pro qua Christus rum dedignatus est motif" Kett in rebellion in Norfolk said it to the court's emissary: "Call not them villeins for whom Christ died." It has been a charter of the oppressed through the ages. The mind of Jesus, exhibited by his death, stands still in marked contrast with our modem materialistic way of making much of things and property and little of men. When Mr. Bernard Shaw flippantly talked of compensating sweated labor with cheap forecasts of heaven, whatever class of people he meant to hit, he did not touch the Jesus of Nazareth and of Calvary. He at least never spoke in that vein; and, if his followers had, the great world might have credited them with more sense and less enthusiasm. The great illustrative fact of heathenism is its cheapen- ing of human life. The last centuries of Indian history before British rule are a commentary on this;" i^e doc- trine of Karma, with its teaching of 8,000,000 rebirths, so said an Indian official of a Maharaja to me, is one cause for the carelessness about individual life. And India is not a land of savages, nor was the Roman Empire. Na- tions are remade less by treaties and Acts of Parliament and rearrangements of outward things than by deep regenerations of spirit and desire. Tyndale, the trans- lator of our New Testament in 1526, said in what seems a very modern tone that, if the King of England did amiss, it lay in the right of the meanest to tell him he did naugrht. England read and revised and re-read his New Testa- ment for a century, and told a king of England that he did naught — told him in a way intelligible to himself and to posterity. No wonder the Marquis Wellesley in 1808 >* On this point it is better to take the evidence of contemporary and non-missionary documents than the political propaganda of a certain party today. THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 223 deprecated the circulation of the Bible in Bengali as dan-< gerous "without the safeguard of a commentary" — au interesting explanation, one notes, of the object of a com- mentary. The Marquis was right; the Bible has made great upheavals in India" as it did in the Roman world and elsewhere. Factory Acts in England began with the evangelical Lord Shaftesbury, and have a parallel in that clause in the Code of Justinian which exempts a mima, who becomes Christian, from being dragged back to the theater and the life of shame. An interesting conversation, illuminative for our pres- ent purpose, is to be found in the Life of Henry George (p. 438). Henry George was talking with Cardinal Man- ning of their common interests. "I loved the people," he said, "and that love brought me to Christ as their best friend and teacher." "And I loved Christ," said Man- ning, "and so learned to love the people for whom he died." But, as Dr. Johnson wrote in Goldsmith's Traveller, "How small of all that human hearts endure That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!" Life is not made by the constitution under which we live, nor by the laws that should control us. It depends far more on what the Greek calls "the unwritten laws the breaking of which brings admitted shame." The caustic English sarcasm, "worse than wicked — ^vulgar," hits off what Thucydides meant. How little manners matter and how much ! George Whitefield, as Dr. Dale once pointed out, never dreamed of preaching about courtesy and good manners, but Jesus did preach about them — did it explicitly and much more implicitly. The "high-minded man," according to Aristotle," "justly despises" others ^* See J. N. Farquhar's fascinating book, Modem Religious Movements in India. ^'' Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 8, p. 1124b. 224 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN and is "ashamed of receiving a benefit." Jesus let women minister to him of their substance, and accepted it as nat- ural and friendly that his disciples should row while he slept, but there is in. every syllable of his teachin£r» in every movement of his mind, that recognition of €k>d's interest in the meanest of men, which is the antithesis of contempt. The definition of a gentleman as one who never puts his feelings before the rights of others or his rights before their feelings, is quite in his vein. The gravamen of rudeness is its suggestion that the other man does not matter, and is uninteresting. Jesus made every man interesting by bringing out that Grod is inter- ested in him. He himself found something attractive or of importance in every man; he had a genius for appre- ciation and he conveyed it to those who caught his mind. If eminent Christians have sometimes lacked it, it has, perhaps, been because they were too eminent to be quite Christian. Jesus, however, said plainly : "Let the greater among you be as the younger,'' and added, in a sentence as charming and playful as it was true: "I am among you as the serving man" (6 iuucoywv) (Luke 22 :26, 27) . Paul, in the same spirit, will have Christians "forbear one another" and "speak truth in love" (Eph. 4:2, 15) ; but even he, one feels, fell short of the charm that appears in Jesus' dealings with men and women. Children went to him, mothers showed him their babies, all sorts of people brought him all sorts of troubles and questions; and he was a man who could be interrupted without explo- sion. He has the secret of charm and he can communicate it, though how is another question, but it is to those who believe in him through and through. Any defect of belief in Jesus shows itself somewhere in unbelief in God or disbelief in man. The headmaster of one of our great schools recently wrote, in an essay on education, that "it is hard to take even the shortest railway journey and keep THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 225 true to t^e Sermon on the Mount." Perhaps Jesus would not have pushed people off a tram-platform, which would seem to indicate that his standards of the relative import- ance of things were different in some way from ours, and that our life is not yet humanized beyond his ideal. Clement of Alexandria tells us of vain persons who held up the example of Jesus as a reason for rejecting marriage, which "they call mere prostitution and a prac- tice introduced by the devil."" This was not mere rhetoric. To primitive thought (and there is still much of it in the world) there was something supernatural in conception, something demoniacal; some religions defied it and made a sacred ritual of the process of reproduction; some repudiated it as polluting. Clement takes another view of Nature, much more like that of Jesus. Nature made us to marry, and "the childless man falls short of the per- fection of Nature."" Men must marry for their country's sake and for the completeness of the universe ;'^ the mar- ried man exhibits "a certain distant image of the true Providence."*' The heathen may practice abortion and expose their children and keep parrots instead, but the begetting and bringing up of children is a part of the Christian married life." "Who are the two or three gathering in the name of Christ, among whom the Lord is in the midst? Does he not mean man^ wife, and child by the three, seeing woman is made to match man by God?"" Tertullian said there -would be something shame- less about God calling us sons, if he forbade us to have sons by taking marriage from us." This group of pas- sages from two great Christian thinkers about the year A.D. 200 is significant enough, more still when we find " Stromateis, 3:49. ^^ Strom., 2:139, S. '^ Strom., 2:140, 1. *^ Strom., 7:70, end. ^ Paidagogos, 2:83, 1. ^ Strom.. 3:68,1. *^Adv. Mar don, 4:17. 226 JESUS IN THE EXl^ERIENCE OF MEN Paul allowing marriage "becaose of harlotries'* (II Cor. 7:1, 2). When one realizes how deeply the ideal of celi- bacy had tainted the spiritual atmosphere, this concep- tion of Christian married life grows more 8urpri8m£r» but it represents the real teaching of Jesus. When men challenged Jesus upon the divorce question, and quoted Moses against him, he threw over Moses. Moses had an eye on his constituency and compromised (Mark 10:5). The real issue was the design of God in making and mating the sexes; did God mean temiwrary unions, shorter or longer? Today we hesitate i>erhaps in referring matters so abruptly to God, and try the inter- mediate court of Nature; and Jesus meets us there quite readily, he has no suspicion of Nature and the facts of the case are all he wants. As usual, he does not much argue the matter. He goes to the home for endless illustrations of spiritual life and he never (like Paul) draws a parable from the breakdown of marriage (Rom. 7 :2) . How much home meant to him appears in his tone from time to time — "the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head'' — ^in the welcome he gives to children, in his tenderness for widows and mothers. It is not idly that t^e friendliest of modern poets slips into speaking of "Little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place." It is just where one would expect them, and exactly what they would be doing. In the Middle Ages — that curious "age of faith" when men believed furiously in Christ, fought crusades for him and burned heretics for him, but accepted neither his teaching nor his spirit as very real or serious — the Church swung altogether over to celibacy; whatever else they did, priests might not marry. "I praise marriage," said Jerome, "I praise wedlock, but because they bear THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 227 me virgins; I gather from the thorn the rose." Luther brought his generation abruptly back to the ideas of Jesus, when he shocked it by marrying the ex-nun Kath- arine Bora.^ The modem biologist, with his mind upon Nature and society, and less interested in church tradi- tion, stands here with Jesus and Luther. "It was one of the greatest social services of the Reformation that it broke with the ascetic ideal so far as marriage was con- cerned, and ranked the married life higher than the un- married. . . . The sterility of monks and nuns and priests for so many centuries turned the laws of heredity against the moral progress of the race.'"^ But the home matters still more than the stock, and Children notori- ously grow up better in Christian homes than in Platonic barracks or convent orphanages — ^and even in quite ordi- nary homes, as French statesmen have found. What England owes to the children of ministef s and clergy and even deacons, may be read in part in the Dictionary of National Biography, a work without much theological bias. The school owes something to the Christian Church. By the second century daily reading of the Bible was inculcated, for the Church quickly realized that the Chris- tian was called to be better educated and more intellectu- ally alert than the heathen — ^to be more "human." By 1609 common education was a municipal charge in Holland, for the "Protestants of che Netherlands saw the immense importance of education to their cause, based as it was on the study of the Scriptures, and the general education of the people and the wide diffusion of printed books, espe- pecially the Bible, had much to do with the reality of the Dutch Reformation, and with its popular character. 9»Xt •"Jerome, £/»., 22:20. «See further Ch. XIV, p. 244. '^ W. Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social CrisiSg 167, 174. "Winnifred Cockshott, The Pilgrim Fathers, p. 114. 228 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN The Pilgrim Fathers, who gave American life its spirit, took these Dutch ideas with them to New En^rland; and school and college were among the first concerns of the Puritans there, as they are still in America. En^^land is the one Protestant country that has despised education. Jo^hn Knox put things on another footing in Scotland a generation before 1609. It is interesting to find that today on the Congo at least one great missionary society will not accept converts into the Church till they can read; the New Testament, i.e., the historical Jesus, is the Negro's best safeguard against superstition, his surest hope of development. And the heathen see what it means; "The God of the Catholics," the saying goes at Yakusu, "has no books." How many colleges, before and after Harvard, founded in 1636 by men "dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," does man- kind owe to Christian emphasis on the development of the mind? The date of The Teaching of the Apostles has been dis- puted. Discovered, and printed in 1881, it came as a shock to those who were not prepared for sudi startling simplicity in the early Church, and some prefer to see in it a fancy sketch of some fourth century heretic. Sounder opinion confirms an earlier date; perhaps about A.D. 100 would serve. Here, then, is a short chapter from this remarkable book. "Everyone that cometh in the name of the Lord, let him be received; and then when you have tested him, you shall know, for you will have sense, right and left. If he that cometh be on a journey, help him as much as you can. But he shall not abide with you more than two or three days, if it be necessary. But if he will settle wiih you, if he is a craftsman, let him work and eat. If he has not a craft, according to your sense take measures that he shall not live among us idle, a Christian. If he will not do this, he is a traflSckei^ in .■:. ii THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 229 Christ. Beware of such." The early Church has to trans- late Jesus' word, "Give to him that asketh of thee" ; and realizes that the best gift a man can have given him is a trade and a chance to work at it. "You will have sense," Probably the modern could not better the suggestion to the little community. Family life, education, trade-teaching — ^the Church began as it has gone on with the ideal of helping men. A "passion for doing good" marked the Corinthian Church, as we have seen ; and there are various ways of doing good. To feed the hungry, is one; to put him in the way of feeding others, is a still better. The Christian was in the world to carry out the ideas of God in their full compass. Many he took from the common store of his times, some he discovered for himself; he would "have sense." He made mistakes, of course; but his love of Jesus was a steady corrective, for it kept him in touch with an emancipating spirit, and gave him an in- spiration which has never died. Stoic cosmopolitanism was eclipsed by Christian. "If then God," says Peter (Acts 11:17), "gave them the same gift, who was I to be able to prevent God?" and he jus- tifies the universalism of the Church from its identity of experience. Jesus was interpreted aright; his thought of God as center, as God and Father of all, included all mankind.** The language of the cross was intelligible to all men; it had the same revelation, the same charm for all. By the end of the first century the hymns of the Apocalypse include all nations and races and languages joining in one song, a new song. That song has not grown old. In Christ there is neither barbarian, Scythian, ** Mr. Montefiore, in Pharisaism and St. Paul, p. 56, in describing Rab- binic Judaism, has a most remarkable sentence: **This indifference, dis- like, contempt, particularism — this ready and not unwilling consignment of the non-believer and the non*Jew to perdition and gloom — ^was quite con- sistent with the most passionate religious faith and with the most exqui- site and delicate charity." 230 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN Jew, nor Greek, as Paul said. We should put other r^ce- names, and it would be equally true. What is more, men of every race know in their hearts that Jesus Christ is a closer bond of union than any other. Every Christian nation by now recofirnizes that the whole world has to be won for Christ; missions are in the program of every church; and in Christ is the hope of the world. Chris- tian experience turns to prophecy; what he has done» he will do "according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself (PhiL 3:21). i^Ul CHAPTER XIV THE RECONCILIATION OF FREEDOM AND RELIGION When St. Paul tells us that "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (II Cor. 3:17), he says what is against traditional etymology. Etymology may tell us what a word originally meant, and sometimes it still means the same; but more often a word makes its own meaning for itself out of the company which it keeps, and forgets all about its origin. The older etymologists, however, connected the word "religion" with the verb that meant to bind, not to loose. Indeed a great anthro- pologist of today, the French Jew, Salomon Reinach, has defined religion as "a collection of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties." That is a charmingly simple definition; but it is, perhaps, rather what he would wish us to think of religion, than anything else. We must remember that a definition may be a war cry or a slander, and that we have to look at the man who makes it and at his purpose as well as at the definition itself. Other thinkers take a profounder view of religion. "Man," writes Professor Gilbert Murray, "is imprisoned in the external present; and what we call a man's reli- gion is, to a great extent, the thing that offers him a secret and permanent means of escape from that prison, a breaking of the prison walls which leaves him standing, of course, still in the present, but in a present so enlarged and enfranchised that it becomes not a prison, but a free world." Similarly, Professor Cairns writes: "Religion 231 232 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN is, fundamentally, on the human side, man's protest and appeal to the Supreme against the sorrows, indi^rniti^ and sins of this present world. It is the endeavor of man, through that appeal, to unite himself ivith the life of that unseen and ruling world, and so to win the power from it to dominate and transmute the life of time." Historically, this is the truer view. Primitive religion, when it has outlived its time, grows to be very like magic and is a limitation upon man's mind and action; but in every really living community thought and religion have always interacted on eadh other. How could it be other- wise? In essence the religious life is the deepest life of all; for the most fundamental thing in man is his relation of himself and of all the world to God, so that thought will be at the very heart of religion. Yet those who say that religion and thought are antag- onistic, and point to the Christian Church and to other religions for proof of what they say, have a certain case. For many men and women realize the need of religion, as they call it, but want it merely as an anodyne against the troubles of life, or as a protection against God. They want ''salvation," regarding it as something definite and precise, a final settlement with God, a discharge of obli- gations, rather than as renewal of relations with an old friend. Many others mean to base their lives on reli- gion, but resent the labor of thought; they prefer things fixed and done with, settled notions, and laws laid down and needing only to be carried out; they do not count thought a duty or a necessity. Men ask for a simple Gospel, "the old, old story," forgetful that the heart of "the old, old story" is only reached when it is daily a new surprise, that nothing that is real remains simple very long. Others lean to ritual on aesthetic grounds or from sentiment, and a great many through sheer force of habit ; and some of them, if only there is enough symbol, are not FREEDOM AND RELIGION 233 very anxious as to what the symbol means — a danger that seems inseparable from symbolism. But, above all, there is a class for whom truth is a static thing, something of which they feel "you know what it is and there it is," as if "the faith once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3) were a set of propositions simple and definite, and life- less as the multiplication table — as if "faith" were not rather an instinct to explore God, to know the heights and depths of Christ, to track out the great spiritual pur- poae behind all existence. There is always disaster where thought and religion are regarded as antagonistic. It has often happened in the history of men and nations, that the religious have stood on one side and the speculative on the other, with a good deal of mutual contempt, sometimes with hatred. In Eng- land the mood is perhaps less one of hatred than of quiet contempt; "the Churdi," someone has said, "is thought of as feminine ; the world is not as much afraid of it as of Ramsay Macdonald." Society depends on thought and movement; if it is not progressive, it declines. The Roman Empire fell because it became an ideal bureau- cracy; men gave up the hope of new ideas, and even the very notion that they were desirable; they left their thinking to be done by civil servants. Freedom is the necessary condition of reaching higher stages of life and thought; and if the Church manage to get the reputation for missing this conception, men turn against it. It is not in the Christian Church alone, but in other religious conmiunities, even in a greater degree, that men have come to believe that, with too close an investigation into religion and its basis, all confidence in it goes; that it is safe, so long as one does not touch it and does not examine it, but that to ask questions is dangerous to faith. The prevalence, real or supposed, of this fear among Christian teachers has provoked the caustic definition of faith as 234 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OP MEN "believing what you know to be untrue." We deserve that taunt when we are shy of thought. That mood is not faith; it is doubt. In some of the most religious spirits of antiquity, as of today, and in every relisrion, we find that inherent scepticism ; and the honest, the candid, and the good say: **li that is religion, let us have none of it." We can have too much of the past, too much even of our inheritance. "If our duty to the Past is to re- member, our second duty is to forget.'" We need to forget; we need to have new experience; we have to be dissatisfied with our range in truth; we have to explore beyond it. All men who know and love truth, know that; and what can they think of a Christian Church, where that spirit is suspect? I When we ask the mind of Jesus upon the question, he is, as always, abundantly clear. The sentence, attributed in the Fourth Gospel (8:32) to Jesus, "The truth shall set you free," is like other sayings in that book, rather an extraordinarily vivid summary of the whole teaching and spirit of Jesus than an actual quotation. If he did not say it — ^well! he lived it; his eyes flashed: "The truth shall make you free." We attribute to Jesus, very un- imaginatively, an omniscience, which takes much of the meaning out of his whole story. Omniscience may be an inert thing; the most omniscient people we meet have often very little mind at all. What we find in the histori- cal Jesus is a much greater thing than omniscience ; it is that freedom of mind, that activity of intellect, which we associate with all great characters who launch into the world ideas that emancipate. Jesus has an infinite capac- ity for interest in things and people, in the human mind and its relations to God. Interest was with him a habit ; ^ J. H. Moulton, The Treasure of the Magi. FREEDOM AND RELIGION 235 it is clear that he had the gift of instinctive observation, Which Wordsworth describes. He recognized the neces- sity of inquiry, which Nature — or, he would have said, Grod — implants in men. He understood the men who ask, who seek, who knock, and he promised that there will be answers to questions and opening of doors. In an extra- ordinary phrase, which seems to rest on other optical theories than ours, he pictured a man's "whole body full of light.'' Jesus, who thought in pictures and spoke in pictures, must have meant more by this than we care- lessly assume as we read it; he must have had some idea in his mind. ''As when the lamp with its flash lightens thee" are his words (Luke 11 :36) ; and one thinks today of the "torches" we used in the dark nights of the war; does he mean a body like some kind of incarnated and per- sonal X-ray, which might light everything up, till the secrets of things stood out revealed — a personality that illuminated everything?* More plainly, he says : "There is nothing hid that shall not be known" (Luke 8:17). "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the King- dom of God" (Luke 8:10) — a thought in vivid antithesis to the cults of mystery and sacrament, which traded in the unknowable and extolled trance above reason. He promises that we are to see our way at last through all the wonders of the whole wide realm of God; and it is the promise of a thinker who does not use words without feeling their meaning, who understands the appeal of God and his ways. It seems fair in view of such sayings to hold that he recognized the progressive character of truth; and this is confirmed by his many parables that turn on growth, on progress and expansion, on life enlarg- ing itself a hundredfold. It is intelligence, after all, progressive intelligence that gives freedom, and not the >Cf. John Bailey, Johnson, p. 120: "Johnson never, even in his religion, left his open eye or his common sense behind him; and common sense told him what a brighter light concealed from St. Francis." 236 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN acceptance of ifirnorance, in whatever piety it cloaks itself. We must remember his independence, his sincerity of mind; we often miss ''the immense amount of real hard thinking implied in the religious and moral teaching of Jesus."* He lived in a world when men were beginning more and more to look to the past (real or fictitious) for guidance in religion. All the cults had sacred books, and many hidden books. He read, but he read ''as one having authority." "It was said to them of old time ... but I say unto you/' is not the utterance of one in bondage to quotations or traditions (Matt. 5:35). He criticized Moses' law — "an eye for an eye" was not right ; and he criticized Moses himself for compromising on a moral question and permitting what was not in God's law (Mark 10 :5, with Matt. 19 :8) . When he used scripture, it was not as his contemporaries did, still less as Christian apologists of a century later did; he went to the heart of it, and took what he found to be true.^ He treated reli- gious traditions and usages in the same way; taboos about food he put aside as irrelevant to a man's real being (Mark 7:18). It is shrewdly suggested that, if he had said anything in tune with the growing fancy for asceti- cism, we should have heard of it. His sayings reflect his mind. He has not the flaws of contemporary style in speech; he is simple and direct; he uses "the lans^uage actually employed by men/' as if he had read and accepted William Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical BaUads (the edition of 1800). Imagination, playfulness, and intensity give life to his words; there is no hint of artifice in them; they are all nature and truth. It is a dynamic speech that does things, like Luther's words, that were called "half-battles." His intolerance of even the half- false in speech is shown in his refusal of polite compli- • Rashdall, Conscience and Christ p. 78. < Cf. Loisy, Ev. Syn., 1:569: "L*f mancipation de Paul, beaucQup plus apparente, n'itait pas plus rccle." FREEDOM AND RELIGION 237 ments ; he will not have "good Master/' and he will limit affirmation and denial to yes and no. Such speech comes, and can only come, from a mind of equal sincerity. He does not use quotations, because he groes to facts — "Tell Jolhn what things ye hear and see" — and to facts which people can verify. Truth is essen- tially loyalty to the fact, to the actual, to the intelligible in the fact; there is no copyright in it; and while some people naively hold that such loyalty narrows range, that it binds and limits the mind, the great poets confirm the experience of Jesus that it sets free. Above all his genius is for the fact with meaning. A man, he suggests, may gain skill in weather lore by observation and reflection. Facts are not all of equal significance. Knowledge in- volves scale and perspective, distinction between mosqui- toes and camels, between potherbs and the great cardinal virtues of faith and meijcy — and intelligence, we may add by way of gloss. Truth is not merely an affair of the intellect, for it depends, as the intellect does too, on a man's whole moral being. Jesus stood for honesty, and for thought and intelligence; and so far as we are loyal to him, we shall not be in bondage to the second-hand or cramped by traditions. On the contrary Jesus makes it clear that he came into the world to emancipate men — not to make them of one mind but of many, to launch divisions of thought. Micah's words will be fulfilled; families will be divided. He "comes to set fire to the world" (Luke 12:49), as if to start the forest fire that changes the whole aspect and character of a countryside. What a picture of himself he draws creating divisions, unsettling men, driving them this way and that, inaugurating all the friction and all the stimulus that comes when men of different minds handle truth in earnest ! He saw all this, and summed up the whole story in the parable of the leaven — disturb- 238 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN ance, disorders, bubbles, and broken bubbles. Some people think the Church's history is a succession of broken bab- bles. Very well, but what makes them, and ivhat breaks them? What bursts the old wine-skins? What makes the seed bear thirty-fold? Jesus believes in that fierce, strenuous, wild, discordant, adventurous creature, life. "Fear not, little flock," he says, "it is your Father's grood pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12 :32) . But there is more than a hint, in another sayinsr, that you must be "violent," as the Authorized Version renders it, a man of drastic mind and forceful action, if you want to capture it and hold it. "The truth shall make you free" — dreadfully free! And when he has linked the Kingdom of God with all this upheaval, he is represented as saying to us: "My peace I give unto you," and: "Ye shall find rest unto your souls." Is he contradicting himself? That he is right is the verdict of the type that Jesus loves ; it is to be the life of adventure in a new world, the life of intellectual battle and spiritual peace, and none better. It all comes from his central belief in God, God the author of life, creative, insurgent, upheaving life, and Grod the lover of it. He is in vivid contrast with the world in which he found himself. The stricter Stoics of that day practically elim- inated God from the world; to the vulgar they left their own religions as good enough for them, so drawing a fatal distinction between truth and religion. The adherents of the mysteries, on the other hand, would not have ques- tions, as we saw, because questions upset faith and strike at the root of religion ; they would have men stick to what they were told, hold to what they do not know, to what they do not understand, to the irrational, to the unex- amined life, to dreams and visions and mystery. What a contrast Jesus is to the Church today, with its lethargy, with its fear of new ideas, its clinging to auth- FREEDOM AND RELIGION 239 ority and the conventional, its mistrust of argument, and of spiritual appeal ! Men have learned to count many of these things as the characteristics of the Church of Christ, as if they were not essential unbelief and atheism. But all that is foreign, to the historic Jesus, utterly repugnant to the very heart of him, as to every man who really believes in truth. No, the real difficulty has not been in Jesus; it has been in ourselves. We have been reluctant to take Jesus seriously; we have not believed that he means what he says, we have labelled it paradox, and dismissed it as if that settled the question. We have not been willing to believe that Jesus and truth will pre- vail, to believe with him that truth is a living thing that looks after itself, because it belongs to God, because it is one with God and shares his vitality. We have been afraid to believe that the Christian Gospel is a thing of God, and that it has his life and his power of giving life and transmitting it. II But there is another side to the story; for the Church of Jesus has been again and again the champion and the exponent of freedom of mind. Paul said : ''I will sing in the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also.'' Understanding was one of the marks of the early Church, and the awakening of the intellectual life. Lucian, the great satirist of the second century, has a story about a false prophet called Alexander, who ran a shrine at Abonoteichos in Asia Minor, and made a good deal of money out of it. At a certain stage in the holy rites in his temple, there was a proclamation: "Epicureans out- side! Christians outside!" The god was good enough for the heathen; but the Christian was not to be taken in with a big snake with a mask tied to it; he would see the string. That is the evidence of a heathen, and the L> 240 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN story seems to me characteristic of the early Church; it shows the quickened mind and the nei¥ independence. Beggars and tramps and strolling prophets, as we have seen/ infested that Church; but The Teaching of thi Apostles shows how soon the Christian brou£:ht sense to bear on new economic questions. "You will have sense,** writes the author. The Christian martyr, Sigsdn, like the passive resister and the conscientious objector of today, had the independence of mind to choose to do his own thinking and not to accept blindfold the opinions dic- tated by the government of the day. Christians carried that determination to think for themselves to the amphi- theatre, and the leopard, to the stake where they were burned alive — ^not one, nor two of them, but dozens— a course which involved some clearness and independence, and they achieved it. We may further note, when we turn to the ordinary everyday life of those first two centuries, that the Gospel spread to higher and higher levels of society. It was, partly, because the people who became Christians £:ot into the habit of handling fact, as John Wesley's converts round Bristol left off being dirty, drunken, and stupid, when the Gospel came to them, and became clean and quick of mind and enterprising, and then found them- selves well-to-do without expecting it, or, in the first instance, of seeking it. The Gospel also captured think- ing people; and one of the features of the second century is that the Church has more and more of the better minds. There was more and more theology, and more and more heresy, which meant that people were thinking*, if not always with the clearness of Jesus, and sometimes too much under the influence of their non-Christian training. The heathen temple was almost always a small place, as it still is, and the Christian church a large one; for the Chapter IX, p. 166; Chapter XIII, p. 229. FREEDOM AND RELIGION 241 temple was a place at Which rites were performed, the Christian church a place where people were taught, and regularly came to learn to think. That is written all through the early Church, and it is written in India today, though, of course, the early Church had neither the money nor the freedom to build. As evidence of activity of mind and of sheer originality in the religious life, we may take the Epistle to the Hebrews. The writer is a man who attempts a new experi- ment in religion, who does a new thing all against the world's religious experience. The synagogue had indeed tentatively led the way, as we have seen, dropping ritual for the Torah ; but this man goes further. It is hard to realize today what a pioneer in thought he was, when he tried the experiment of a religion without priest, altar, sacrament, or sacrifice, without the Torah, "outside the camp," outside Israel, and gave up all except Jesus and the presence of God. The Christian was an innovator, a revolutionary in thought, in those early days, and he was generally right. One of the most striking things is how fundamentally wrong all the thinkers outside the Chris- tian Church had been on monotheism. None of them believed that ordinary people could take in the idea of one God only, or would be content with it, if they did take it in. That was axiomatic even with the Stoic. The history of Christendom and of Islam has shown exactly the opposite, and has proved that, for a religion to live and to be passionate, it must have one God only. So far from being an idea impossible to take in, it is the idiea that the common man has realized again and again; and it has been with him a driving force, a passion, and a source of power. In war, empire, and commerce, no less than in learning and thought, the monotheist has triumphed over the polytheist. It means surely that his religion has given him something real. Judaism was 242 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN monotheistic, but it was a sect; the Christian Church was universal, and its monotheism conquered the world* One of the greatest teachers of the early Church, Clement of Alexandria, maintained the cause of Gresk culture against the "simple Christian.'' The simple Christian insisted that faith alone is needed; ''only believe/' was his regular quotation. Clement has not quite our modem word; he calls them "orthodoxasts." Against these old-style believers, he defends the Chris- tian's right to the utmost of learning that man can have. If the Law was the schoolmaster that led Israel to Christ, the schoolmaster of Greece was philosophy; and both were given by God. How can the Christian but have the right to study philosophy? Who has a better ri^ht ? This freedom is the mark of the school of Jesus. Wilamowitz- Moellendorf goes so far as to say that ''Christianity over- came the competing religions of the East, because it Hel- lenized itself more thoroughly than they did.'** By "Hel- lenizing itself," he means that Christians achieved, more than the adherents of any other cults, that habit of clear thinking which is preeminently Greek. This is true; Jesus pointed that way by word and example. It is a curiously interesting indication of the affinity of [clear thinkers everywhere, a reminder (not unneeded today) that Jesus was more than a Galilaean peasant at the apocalyptic point of view. The Christian Church may have come from the East; but it was less Eastern than the mystery religions. Indeed the scholar Titius holds that the Hellenized categories, to which Paul made the transition possible, express the real meaning of Jesus better than the apocalyptic forms, which he had himself to use.* •Gr. Lit. GescK 135. ' I owe this to Dr. D. S. Cairns. FREEDOM AND RELIGION 243 III To pass on to the age of the Reformation: out of the Renaissance comes^ a German scholar, Martin Luther. Whatever our attitude to some present-day Germans, we must not forget our debt to Germany four centuries ago, and often since, or we shall think untruly, without bal- ance and without perspective. What a battle there has been about the Scripture in our own day, we know very well. Luther, like other men reborn in that new age, read the Scripture with new eyes. Here are some of his conclusions. He denied the Mosaic authorship of part of the Pentateuch ; he said that Job was an allegory and not history; he called the book of Jonah childish; he main- tained that the book of Kings was a thousand paces ahead of Chronicles ; and that the Epistle of James is an "epis- tle of straw"; and of the author of Ecclesiastes he said that ''he has neither boots nor spurs, but rides in his socks." In his day the interpretation of Scripture was still conducted by the allegoric method; it was a matter of hunting for types and cryptic prophecies. Isaac on the altar was a type of Christ; so were the 318 servants of Abraham. Cyprian, in the third century, had laid down that wherever wine is mentioned in the Old Testfa- ment, it is a prophecy of the eucharist, and wherever water, of baptism. Luther rejects all these ingenuities as "merely ridiculous and childish fopperies; yea, it is an apish work in such sort to juggle with Holy Scrip- ture;"* with which we shall agree. The man is here as modern as he can be. He studied Greek: and a new epoch in European thought began, when he learned that the Greek word Metanoein means "to think again," and not, as the Latin •Table-Talk, Ch. 59 (the 17th century translation). 244 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN said, "to do penance."* He studied church history; and, in the words of Principal Lindsay, he was ''half ^niltant and half terrified at the result of his studies/' The power of the Pope rested on sham history and bogus documents— H)n the forged Decretals and on the forged Donation of Constantino. Other scholars had led the way here ; but when Luther saw that they were rigrht, scholar- ship was translated into action, and into history. "Luther's speeches at Leipzig," says Dr. Lindsay, "laid the foundation of that modem historical criticism of in- stitutions which has gone so far in our days."** Yes, and more; the man had entered into the freedom of Christ; he was not afraid of fact; he learnt, he thought, and he saw the relevance of the facts ; and he acted with the free- dom that Jesus had given him. He re-examined the question of vows and of celibacy; and then he married his Katharine, and had his little John, and he learned the beauty and delight and difficulty of family life. He loved singing and laughter, and little children; and he wrote Christmas carols, and translated the Bible. The contri- bution of Bible translation to freedom of thought and education we have already discussed." Luther struck, as the missionaries today are striking, a blow for freedom of mind, for the sweeping away of all superstition, by putting the Bible in the hands of com- mon people and bringing the historical Jesus face to face with them. How directly Luther approaches the real! Men talked about visions of angels and of saints. Luther anticipated modem psychologists in suspecting such things. Luther said: "If it were in my choice, I would not wish God to appear to me or to speak to me * Chapter V. It is an illuminating contrast that Lo^^^^ after trsring Erasmus' Greek Testament, refused to read it, hecause it interfered wiS *'his devotional emotions." Cf. Froude, Erasmus, p. 130. »»T. M. Lindsay, Reformation, I, pp. 235, 239. " Chapter XII, Chapter XIII, pp. 206, 228. See A. V. G. AUen, Cmm tinuity of Christian Faith, p. 275. FREEDOM AND RELIGION 245 from heaven." No, he would "hold by His common revela- tion to all men in the words and works of Christ."" He was for no private property in revelation, no spiritual aristocracy. And further, "No man," he said, "must be coerced in spiritual matters." That is the voice of free- dom. It is a pity that we do not hear more of it. The emphasis laid by the religious today on authority and tradition does not point to freedom. The claim to the right of private judgment and the great doctrines of justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers meant (and still mean) the right of the individual con- science, and its duty, to seek, to find, and to hold truth as it is enabled by God — the widest of all charters of liberty. Behind it all is Luther's conviction of the value, the meaning and force of the crucified Jesus." The Chris- tian religion is based on fact, not fancy, nor even dogma. It begins with Jesus, working, living, suffering; and the condition of its progress is never to get far away from the pierced hands and the crown of thorns. The whole Reformation movement was an attempt to get nearer to the mind of Jesus. Monasticism, sacraments, tradition, the Church — did they bring men nearer to that mind? That was the test. Positively, the emphasis fell on God in Christ, on the individual soul, on righteousness as illuminated and given by Christ. Out of this new appeal to Jesus came a new world, a new era, a new England. Out of it, or from nowhere, will come the world we want to see. We cannot dispense with the historical Jesus yet; he is our best safeguard against wild thinking, fancy, theosophy, poljrtheism, superstition, as he is against rigidity, dullness, ofiicialism, and oppression — against Zeitgeist in every form. There is much cant today about the divisions of Chris- tendom, but it is still true, as Milton said, that "under ** See Herrmann, Communion of Christians with God, pp. 187» 188. "See Chapter IV; Chapter VI. 246 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN the fantastic terrors of sect and religion, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and under- standing which God hath stirred up.'^ We must unleara some of our talk about "unhappy divisions.'' Divisions are only iinhappy when tempers are sharp and awkward; otherwise, they may be very profitable, and very happy. The alternative may be spiritual death, as history has witnessed before now. Public opinion does not neces- sarily mean freedom, it may be the death of liberty, and only the spirit of Jesus can revive it. IV In the nineteenth century the Church had a great struggle about geology and Genesis. But there were people who saw that the Church of Christ was based on something better than Moses' knowledge of the rocks— on quite another kind of Rock. Jesus himself had con- demned Moses as an opportunist for his compromise on marriage. If Moses was wrong on divorce, why should he be right about geology? Which is the worse error? After that came the higher criticism; and again there were people who saw that we rest on the living Jesus^ historical land present, and who found it possible, like the earliest Christians, who had not yet a New Testa- ment, to love and enjoy Jesus and have life in him. Think of the incalculable gain that followed, the freedom of mind won for Christian thinkers, the right to believe in a real Jesus without sacrifice of intellectual honesty. Through difficulty and pain they found a way out, ^d they brought us into freedom. If today we do not trouble about geology or higher criticism, and it is rather the ^* Cf. Phillips Brooks, Light of the World, p. 85. In the Puritmn cen- tury, "everything was probed to the bottom, all delegated authorities were questioned. ... It never frightened the Puritan when you t>ade him stand still and listen to the speech of God." FREEDOM AND RELIGION 247 problems of psychology in connection with religion that perplex us, we surely need not be afraid. Or, again, if we are told that economic science clashes with what Jesus said of economics, we shall go and see what Jesus did say; and perhaps, like the writer of The Teaching of the Apostles, we shall get some inkling of what he would say, if he were living in a different order of society from that of the Roman Empire. The very last thing we should find would be any insistence on his part that change was wrong. Mohammed fixed Moslem chronology irrevocably and disastrously on the basis of an erroneous astronomy, current in his day; and in that there is an illuminating contrast with the historical Jesus. Where the spirit of Jesus is, there will be liberty and with it a new spirit of joy and of freedom. We do not go into the intellectual problems of our day tied and bound, because Jesus set us free; we know whose we are and whom we serve; we know the type of mind that he loved, the type of mind that he gave; and Jesus will be for us, as for those before us, the Author of Freedom. But surely we have to go further. The Christian life is not to be conceived as a long struggle of accommoda- tion with the discoveries which men of science and scholarship make of God's laws in the world around us and of God's doings in the past. The follower of Jesus is called to be a pioneer himself; and it is a common experience that one great feature of the Christian life is the constant feeling that there is more beyond. There is something of the infinite in Jesus; and, as one feels •with every real aspect of nature, we are never done learning. I have gained more here from the poet Wordsworth than from anybody. The poet seems a man with no very symmetrical system of the universe, and for this reason, he would tell us, that he is always being surprised by what he thought he knew. Common peo- 248 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN pie know such lots of things ; he knows the waterfall, he knows the daffodil and the celandine, and knows them intimately. "Yes/' he says, "and then one day the daffodil spoke a new language and said strange thin^rs, that I had never heard it say before ; so then I knew that I did not know even it." That is what the poets teach us about the real ; and there is the same quality in Jesus— the genius for surprising even his intimates with fresh wonder. He brings all God's infinite into our business and bosom. With him we feel that nothing real is alien, that all is human, and everything is at home with him. Christians have hesitated about thought, and not been sure of art ; and, as a result, the philosopher is not always friendly to the Christian, and the artist still less; but they would have been at home with our Master. Jesus gives a "worth-while-ness" to everything. "Your labor is not in vain in the LfOrd,'' Paul says. The liabor of poet, artist, and thinker is to bring truth and beauty into life, to capture the unrealized. Carlyle said that "oU labor is an appeal from the seen to the unseen.'' Jesus stands for the larger life ; he is come that we might ran^e fur- ther into the unseen, into regions yet untrod — that we "might have life and have it more abundantly,'' or in mod- em speech, "more overflowing vitality." Jesus means exploration of God, the bracing of all the soul's energries and their development for that splendid task. Thought is a primary Christian duty; every Christian's duty and opportunity. How is (Jod to be reached without thought? or Jesus to be understood? The very existence of Jesus has been to humanity one of the greatest stimulants to thoughts; and thus one of the great factors in developing the human mind. His personality has been the most bafiling problem with which men have had to wrestle; it is the key to any true intelligence of human nature. Historically, one of the FREEDOM AND RELIGION 249 marks of the early Church was that, though it did not come from the upper ranks of society and had not the highest culture, it out-thought the ancient world all along the line. The man who tries to explain Jesus will come out of the attempt a greater man than ever he went in, if he works with any depth and seriousness. It is hard even yet to predict a date for the achievement of the task. One may study Christology, and not be much better, but the intimate knowledge of Jesus is an eman- cipating force, and the effect of consorting with him is to enlarge the whole nature — -sympathy, intelligence, every faculty — in short to develop a man to his utmost and to transcend that utmost. The cross remains a chal- lenge to every generation. It raises all the questions as to pain and death, it brings us face to face with the necessity of rethinking God. A man awakened to one set of interests is more apt to understand another, and there is no end to the activity of growing intelligence. The redeemed man is always ahead of what he was before, and the more fully he is remade by Jesus Christ the more he goes ahead. "Conquering and to conquer" is a true description of the Christian soldier as well as of his Leader. He gets the instinct and the inspiration for growth and progress from Jesus; and the new man and the new ideas gravitate to one another. As Dr. Dale said, "The healthier and nobler forces of the Renaissance found their natural home and received religious sanction in Protestantism" — the religion of the rediscovered Jesus. V One or two questions remain. There is little about art in the gospels. One might even say that there is no indication there that Jesus cared about art ; though per- haps it would be truer to say that the people with whom 250 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN he worked did not. We have to remember the back^rround of Judaism with its hereditary hostility to the paganism of Greek art. His disciples, indeed, were impressed by the Temple, which was a new one and not of the best period; and it may not have been the highest art that the artists embodied in the stones and the votive offer- ings which the Galilaean peasants admired. But there is a better way of approaching the matter. Let us look at the words of Jesus. Think how that man tells a story; he sees and fells, like a poet ; and can we say that art is alien to him? that the creative spirit, which is the soul of art, is alien to Jesus, when he can create, as he does, in the sphere of language? when he taught mankind a new habit of language altogether? He feels deeply, and his speech is alive at once with imagination; and that comes very near the artist's temperament. Jesus is much more natural" in his speech than most men, simpler and deeper, and that is partly why he baffles the literalists so badly; it takes a poet to understand him.^' The greatest English poet of the last two Ihundred years is Wordli^- worth, and he is the man who used the plainest language, who linked the most commonplace words and the most original thought, as Euripides did in Greece. Jesus has the same gift in "touching the common," till the bush in his story is aflame with God, more than in the legend of Moses, till the bird in the bush is a source of joy to God, till the flowers on the tree and on the ground beside it become an expression of God's own sense of beauty." I can quite believe that the great a^^tists, when they really see him, move past us, and find themselves at home ""Art is perfect when it seems to be nature," said Longintts, ch. 22. *• "Not infrequently the first native contributions to a Christian liter- ature take the form of hymns." — World's Missionary Conference, 1910, Report, vol. II, p. 124. ^^A very remarkable expression in the Wisdom of Solomon (13,3) is worth recalling here. The writer speaks of fire, wind, swift air, circling stars, raging water, luminaries of heaven; "for the first AuthcM* of beauty created them." FREEDOM AND RELIGION 251 with him. He, like them, goes beyond us in his intuitions of God's sense of color and form. The function of art is the enjoyment and the interpre- tation of the whole of God's infinite life in its whole com- plex of relations. Who has interpreted God and God's real more gloriously than Jesus? Who has given men more right to enjoy God's gift of beauty, or done more to develop the faculty of joy which is the means of apprehending it? Who has given us the warrant to believe that "man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever"? Art, if it is to achieve its supreme work, in the union of form and freedom, implies the intensely individual mind at work on the facts of God; and in religion, as Jesus taught it, law and liberty in unison are the outstanding features, God and the human soul busy with each other and in harmony. Dr. For- syth's fine book, Christ upon Parnassus, deals with this subject. Christianity, he says, in giving to the individual infinite value, opened a new and infinite field to art, the field of expression and characteristic, in passion, senti- ment, and affection. The story of the Church is not without significance in the history of art. As men gain surer glimpses of the real in Jesus, there are new fields of art for us. The best interpreter, surely, will be the great Author of love. Love is the key to art. Goethe said about Heine, that he had many great gifts, but he failed for want of love. Jesus, on the contrary, it has been said, liberated in the world an endless force of love. In lowlier language, he had the gift of appreciation, and he communicates it. He teaches men to see the wonder- ful and the beautiful in others, to see and to love the beautiful in nature, and to go on so doing till all God's infinite world is their own. Is that alien to art? A gap frequently felt in the systems of theologians is due to their failure to allow a place in religion for 252 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN humor. Have we ever fully availed ourselves of the playfulness of Jesus* speech? When he told his fol- lowers that if a man hits them on one cheek, they must turn the other, did he not know they would lau£:h — he, who grew up in the market-place of Nazareth ? When he said that the distinction between Jew and Gentile was that the Gentile was always asking, "What shall we eat and what shall we drink?" was there no play of humor in that? When he spoke about swallowing a camel, was there no gleam of playfulness there? I do not believe that the phrase of Jesus there was just current coin. At any rate, the people of the day did not take it so, and I think they would have known their own common phrases, and would hardly have troubled to record them. They remembered his ways of speech, because in his playful- ness and charm there was something individual and orig- inal. We are told that the fount of humor is a loving heart, that sees the incongruity, and smiles and si^rhs at the same time. John Bunyan expressed it exactly, when he said: « Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy checkle while his heart doth ache/' Bunyan's humor had provoked criticism of his Pilgrim, as he tells us in a later preface: ''And some there be who say he laughs too loud." There are always people like that in the Church — dear, earnest, useful people, and so dull; but, when the Kingdom of Heaven comes, everybody will have sense of humo¥> and in every case it will be a gift from the same Giver. "A real sense of humor," wrote Rendel Harris, ''breaks into flower when we have overcome the world."" >*Cf. Mr. Glutton Brock's remark that "Christianity has lost its i>ower of laughter, because it has been merely on the defensive."^ "The um- verse," sa^s another, "means well, when there are such exquisitely funny things in it." FREEDOM AND RELIGION 253 And who is he that overcometh the world? It is matter- of-fact that kills art and kills humor; and it is Jesus, who gets people out of matter-of-fact, and gives the spirit of the new life, to which all these things are real and living, who gives the artist subjects and gives him free- dom, gives him love and humor and happiness, sensitive- ness to the questions and suggestions of Nature, and the enjoyment of God. The great 4;hing that Jesus has done, the center of all, has been to enlarge man's capacity for God. That is the secret of it. The idee^ of little children are very lim- ited. They are not always very ready to recognize the claims of "gutter children" or outsiders. The story of home life is the story of the growth of the child and the training of his capacity for taking the whole world into his heart ; and Jesus has done that with men and women, who are harder to teach than little childf en. Jesus has, indeed, given the human heart the capacity for God. God is comprehended in how many ways, along the line of every faculty, and of every sensitiveness? God speaks to one man in color, to another in sound, to another in movement, to another in rhyllim, to another in the beauty of children, to another in the need of the world. Jesus all through the centuries has been making the human heart larger, and more human, and more apt to get hold of God and then to want more of him. He has been, of all beings, the most intelligent of God, the most sympa- thetic with all God's creatures, the great interpreter, not only of God, but of everjrthing in which God is interested, the bird on the wing, the flower in the field. Where the spirit of the LfOrd Jesus is, there is liberty. IHHIIIIIIII 3 2044 017 238 320 1 1 B 3 4 » O / O B~ GLOVER, Terrot Reaveley .Tirana In the TIT1.E j^ ^^^'^-^gftfift Qf pen.. n 125 .G5'*5 GLOVER, Terrot Beaveley BR Jeeus in the experience 12^ of men. .G^U^ 3 2044 017 23B 320 - 1 Z S 4 b O / GtOVEH. Terrot Beaveley CallNniabef | AUTHOR BR ^H -4 :GIiOVER, Terrot Beayeley BR I Jesus in the experience 125 jof men, .GSU?